“WHAT happened to me? Did I lose my talent? Will I ever be good again?” A deep-sea explorer and documentary filmmaker, Steve Zissou (Bill Murray), is gripped by the kind of mid-life crisis that makes a man question whether, at 52, he’s too old to don his ocean adventurer’s Speedos once again, or even whether the regulation Team Zissou red knitted cap even fits any more. His disenchanted wife Eleanor (Anjelica Huston — see interview), a Zandra Rhodes fashion plate with a brilliant scientific mind, looks on, steely and unsympathetic.

The director Wes Anderson’s fourth film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is a lovely, slightly wistful, tragicomedy. As before, Anderson assembles his picture like a box of delights, each compartment filled with a treasured detail that helps us to make sense of Zissou’s world. And, like Anderson’s Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, the film orbits around a charismatic, irresponsible man who is ill-suited to shouldering the family responsibilities with which he finds himself lumbered.

In Zissou’s case, the responsibility is Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson), a young airline pilot who may or may not be his son. On a whim, Steve invites Ned to join him on his latest mission, a decision that causes a certain amount of tension and jealousy in some members of his de facto family, the multicultural Team Zissou.

It says a lot about the obsessively detailed, strikingly original and hermetic little worlds that Anderson creates for his movies that the obvious references to draw when describing The Life Aquatic are with his previous films. There is one other picture that springs to mind though, in terms of its milieu of affluent oddballs — Hal Ashby’s eccentric and darkly comic Harold and Maude.

Perhaps in a nod to Ashby’s influence, Anderson casts Bud Cort, who played the teenaged Harold, as an insurance company stooge who is on Zissou’s ship to oversee the budget on the latest documentary.

The other clear cinematic references are to the films of Jacques Cousteau. Anderson lovingly re-creates the look of the film stock of Cousteau’s ocean adventures, and their formal, obviously staged, action sequences.

For the most part though, this is inarguably an Anderson picture, a magpie stash of cool cultural ephemera (schools of stop-motion animated fish created by Henry Selick; Portuguese acoustic versions of David Bowie songs; the Adidas limited-edition Zissou trainer). It has Anderson’s trademark blend of deadpan humour and laid-back melancholy.

What sets this apart as the director’s best film, though, is what makes it his darkest picture so far: a base note of despair and anguish that rumbles throughout and occasionally cuts to the surface like a torpedo. “Why didn’t you contact me?” says Ned.

“Because I hate fathers and I never wanted to be one,” snaps Zissou.

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