Steve Zissou, for all his woe-is-me anguish, lives a fantasy life of grand adventure. Compare that with the scale of ‘Bottle Rocket’ and ‘Rushmore’, and the crimped realities of their protagonists. In a way, that’s what’s been missing from Anderson’s movies since: the sense of limits, real limits, not the manufactured ones of a famous oceanographer, or of pampered American tourists seeking truth in India (The Darjeeling Limited), or of the hipster filmmaker trying to run a chaotic set. In ‘Bottle Rocket’’s Dignan and Max Fischer, Anderson mined pathos from juxtaposing outsized dreams with modest means. Steve Zissou doesn’t even belong in the same world—he seems like a character Max Fischer dreamed up for one of his plays.

He called you a cunt, didn’t he?