The Odyssey

The man in the red beanie hat, Jacques Cousteau, is the sub­ject of this plush, polite and very unof­fi­cial biog­ra­phy from French direc­tor Jérôme Salle. Play­ing like a big bud­get TV movie, The Odyssey chron­i­cles a large seg­ment of Cousteau’s life start­ing with the birth and end­ing with the death of his son, Philippe, played by Pierre Niney. Fans of the icon­ic oceanographer’s pio­neer­ing work would like­ly do best seek­ing out his excel­lent nature and eco­log­i­cal doc­u­men­tary fea­tures and TV spe­cials, as this is essen­tial­ly an elon­gat­ed, CG-pow­ered Wikipedia entry with the odd melo­dra­mat­ic insert.

Things start well, with Lam­bert Wilson’s dec­o­rat­ed naval offi­cer – sur­round­ed by his lov­ing fam­i­ly – decid­ing that he wants to pack it all in and live a life out there on the briny. Audrey Tatou plays his long-suf­fer­ing wife, Simone, who starts of as the brains of the out­fit, but soon suc­cumbs to the lone­li­ness of an exis­tence as the sole female on creaky research ves­sel, Calyp­so. The film ini­tial­ly makes it appear as if the pres­sure placed on this star-crossed pair­ing will augur the human dra­ma, but very quick­ly, Simone is swept to the side as the sto­ry nar­rows its focus on Jacques’ var­i­ous mad-eyed busi­ness endeavours.

There’s a love­ly ear­ly scene of the fam­i­ly tak­ing a sub-aquat­ic plunge into an under­wa­ter cove to observe the exot­ic sea life. Salle cuts through a sense of oth­er­world­ly won­der with a dash of dan­ger – hint­ing that this line of work is not with­out its haz­ards, even if it pays major expe­ri­en­tial div­i­dends. Shafts of light press through the water­line like a spot­light and small fish weave in between them and then descend into the shad­ows. The idea of shar­ing this secret spot – unsul­lied by human hands – is what dri­ves Jacques to embrace the life of an all-or-noth­ing marine educator.

But by the point of the half-way mark, the film fall to pieces, com­press­ing time and events into a hur­ried mon­tages and doing away with any of the char­ac­ter work from the ear­ly stages. Though you end up believ­ing that Salle and his co-writer Lau­rent Turn­er believe that, despite his flaws as a father, Cousteau was ulti­mate­ly a good man who dreamed too big for the moment in which he was liv­ing. The film falls foul of many biopic com­mon, the main one being that you just can’t com­press the life of a per­son into a fea­ture-length run­time, how­ev­er hard you try.