I can think of few contemporary filmmakers as divisive as Wes Anderson. No matter who you ask, no one seems to have a neutral opinion on the man. His work is so uniquely stylized as to completely polarize the reactions of those who come across it. Those flat shots, those wry deliveries, those costumes--they all culminate in a precisely branded aesthetic that no other director has managed to approach.

I've always fallen on the "love" side of the love/hate divider when it comes to Anderson's films. Some elicit stronger reactions from me than others--watching The Royal Tenenbaums has become an essential yearly ritual for me, whereas I probably won't ever buy The Darjeeling Limited on DVD--but on the whole, I'm utterly charmed by what he does. Before making the trip out to rewatch The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou at a local indie theater yesterday, I started asking myself exactly why I love Anderson's work as much as I do. Is he really a visionary filmmaker, or am I just inevitably charmed by hipster quirk?

My friends who felt nothing but cold distaste for The Life Aquatic and its brethren found themselves too detached from Anderson's characters to become engaged with his plots. They got bored almost immediately, put off by the continuous smirk that seems to be overlaid on top of every minute of flat, monotonous dialogue. I understand their reaction. In any given Anderson film, the emotional language is so coded, so far from realism that it starts to alienate a certain kind of viewer. As someone who often feels alienated by straight realism, who enjoys imaginative filmmaking even if it starts to become ridiculous, the stylization of Aquatic et al never put me off. But does that make it good? 

After revisiting The Life Aquatic--and seeing it on the big screen for the first time--I've decided that Anderson knows exactly what he's doing. His stories have the same depth of feeling as any important story told on screen. He just masks it--with wit, with quirk, with oddity and charm. Because that's what people do, often enough, to process their own stories. And because we are always in need of new ways to look at old dilemmas as if for the first time. You can watch a hundred movies about a man growing increasingly distant from his wife, his friends, his whole life as he reaches middle age, but few of them will resonate with the same pathos as The Life Aquatic. The absurdity subdues, isolates, and ultimately salvages the emotional core of the movie. The presence of the mask forces us to pull it off to see what's beneath. And it delights while doing so.