Seven, going on eight. Hard to decide; it's that kind of film, really.
"The Life Aquatic" defies classification. Completely. For anyone who says that Hollywood movies always follow a set of well-defined formulae, designed by its global marketing machine, there's this: a film about a middle-aged, once-famous oceanographer in pursuit of a "jaguar shark" along with a hotchpotch team of recruits, a reporter, a long-lost son, an unfaithful wife and two trained dolphins. Condense that lot into a trailer...
In a sense, it's actually quite old-fashioned: an adventure movie, without any rules. Or logic, often. In others, it's much more complex than that: while it is very silly in places, and that's part of its charm, its comedy has the lightness of touch that you'd expect from Wes Anderson without succumbing to cleverness, and there's always a touching understanding of the humans involved, no matter how bizarre the situation.
It doesn't always hang together. But it does make for a deeply watchable film, never less than entertaining, sporadically hilarious, and sometimes rather touching too. When he finally finds his jaguar shark, the whole thing seems to make a curious kind of sense, somehow.
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