Nobody does world-weariness better than Murray. "Aquatic" taps into the same mournful quality he used in "Lost in Translation" ("Son of a b—-, I'm sick of these dolphins," he moans), and there are echoes of Gene Hackman's selfish character in "Tenenbaums."

But "Aquatic" is not as easy to love as those films. Anderson is going for something here — the actors take deadpan inexpressiveness farther than anyone since Buster Keaton, forcing us to make decisions about who the characters are and what they want — but the elaborate sets and fanciful animation work against the lethargy of the acting style Anderson admires. Hackman's boisterous lout stood out in "Tenenbaums," but everyone in "Aquatic" does the same iron-poor-blood acting, so nobody grabs our attention.

I admire what Anderson is trying to do. Although tone is one of the trickiest things to maintain in a movie, "Aquatic" never wavers from its subdued laid-backness. Murray makes Zissou a memorable character, a jerk who covers up his neediness ("Please don't make fun of me," he asks a journalist played by Cate Blanchett) with bluster. And there's an intriguing tension between artifice — the movie opens with theatrical curtains parting and occasionally shows actors waiting for their cues — and the realistic dialogue, which has the aimlessness of actual chitchat instead of the shapeliness of drama.