Two musicians dominate “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.” One is Devo alumnus Mark Mothersbaugh, who provides yet another of his trademark jangly scores, this time with some infectious electro added to the mix. The other is David Bowie whose “Hunky Dory”-era catalog has been freshly arranged by actor/musician Seu Jorge and is crooned in Portuguese. But under these catchy tunes there’s an other sound, soft at first, then rising in volume to overwhelm all else: glug glug glug. It is the sound of Wes Anderson’s imagination getting sucked into a bog.

Let’s go back to the time when it swam, to a signature moment from the Anderson oeuvre: A melancholy young woman, wrapped in fur, alights from a bus to the strains of “These Days.” Clocked to Nico’s poignant warble and John Cale’s pining viola, the scene unreels in mesmerizing slow-(e)motion. It’s a heart-stopping fusion of song and image, one of many epiphanies that popped out from the storybook mannerism of “The Royal Tenenbaums.”

That was Mr. Anderson’s third film, following the low-key charmer “Bottle Rocket” and the quietly triumphant “Rushmore” – one of the sweetest, most disarming films of the 1990s. Elaborating on the foundation of these solid predecessors, “The Royal Tenenbaums” took a big risk by coding its voluptuous tendresse into obsessive artifice.

Every character was tricked out in their own special costume and color, every set dressed up for maximum fairy-tale density, every montage layered with textual whimsy and whiplash gags. It works – there’s a glowing hearth inside the tricked-out facade – but it’s right on the edge of decadence, very close to the exhaustion of a style.

Where does an artist go from there? Sadly, to “The Life Aquatic,” a lifeless, fussy spectacle that renders its story with the same self-conscious formalism as “Rushmore” and “Tenenbaums” but none of their contact with the deep. It’s a shallow aquarium of a movie, swimming with gimmicky fish, that imagines itself a quirky emo update of “Moby Dick.”

The movie begins overwrought and undernourished, with a suffocating complexity of design. We open on a proscenium view of a stage, where the newest film by oceanic adventurer/filmmaker Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) is about to premiere. In the film-within-the-stage-within-the-film, we blaze through a montage introduction to the crew of Zissou’s ship, the Belafonte.

Most formidable is his estranged wife, Eleanor Zissou (Anjelica Houston), the brains and bankroll behind the operation. Calm as a clam and suave as a swan, her role in the film will be to smoke cigarettes on the periphery of events and strike postures that suggest some unfathomable disappointment. Willem Dafoe, confused in dorky shorts, plays Klaus Daimler, an angry German with a heart of gold.

Also on board are two Siamese cats, a pair of not-so-intelligent dolphins, several parakeets, and a number of unpaid interns who are made to lift heavy objects and prepare cappuccino. There are others, but it’s characteristic of the film’s thinness that they make no impression worth recording.

Players accounted for, the introductory film moves on to bait a Big White Metaphor. Zissou’s loyal crewmate, Esteban du Plantier (Seymour Casesel, the loyal doorman in “Tenenbaums”), is devoured by the mysterious Jaguar Shark. This creature may or may not exist – doubt and uncertainty are dominant themes of the film – but Zissou vows to hunt it down and avenge his friend.

Post-premiere, Zissou is approached by an Air Kentucky pilot named Ned Plimptom (Owen Wilson), who may or may not be the captain’s long-lost son. Zissou invites him to join the crew of the Belafonte, and together they set sail over the choppy waters of regret and reconciliation.

Joining this troubled expedition is pregnant journalist Jane Winslett- Richardson (Cate Blanchett), sent to profile Zissou. Hostile but smitten, the captain vies with his son for her affection. Ned becomes captivated when he overhears Jane reading Proust aloud in her cabin; deep into “Swann’s Way,” Ms. Blanchett delivers one of the only good jokes: “Want me to fill you in on the story so far?”

The plot of “The Life Aquatic” doesn’t merit much synopsis. There is an intrusion of Filipino pirates, the kidnapping of a “bond company stooge” (Bud Cort) on board the Belafonte and his rescue on the Ping islands. It all feels somewhat desperate and altogether arbitrary, a “wacky” scenario that enables Mr. Anderson to indulge in his mania for wide-angle symmetry, obsessive production design, and mopey pop poetics.

Wry as he might, Mr. Murray can’t save the picture. Indeed, his famous resignation seems as much aimed at “The Life Aquatic” as at the failures of his character. The problem may be that Mr. Anderson is overreaching with Zissou, a fading celebrity who laments his fall from esteem, his lack of respect, the shambles of his personal life. The self-reflexivity of this film is just another costume.

Mr. Anderson is too young, successful, and acclaimed for such autumnal angst. He pulled off similar material in “Tenenbaums” because there was a real story to tell, and because the point of view was decentralized, his sympathies scattered throughout the ensemble. “The Life Aquatic” was designed for Mr. Murray, and that’s the problem – it’s designed, rather than felt.