Mark Reviews Movies: BECOMING COUSTEAU

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 21, 2021

For a few decades, Jacques Cousteau was a household name, likely around the world, because he brought previously unseen and unimaginable images from under the sea to television in bright and vibrant color. His fame lasted for maybe a decade or so after his death in 1997, although it was a less direct kind of fame—more about the general idea of Cousteau's work and his reputation and the iconography surrounding him as a modern-day explorer.

One can tell that, in the generation since his death, the legend of Cousteau has more or less faded from popular culture, so Becoming Cousteau isn't simply a documentary biography of the man. It's an attempt to re-awaken Cousteau's importance within the public consciousness.

Liz Garbus' film is a fine effort in that latter regard, focusing Cousteau's life, not only as an example of environmentalism and activism, but also as story of how much a person can change within a matter of decades, years, or even less time. The story here eventually revolves around Cousteau's evolving realization of just how much humans have changed and continue to change the planet in increasingly dangerous and destructive ways.

This wasn't his goal when he started diving, traveling the world, and recording his and his crew's adventures beneath the waters. Indeed, Cousteau himself would be the first to admit that his earlier work was irresponsible in environmental terms—and that he was personally responsible for helping certain companies create most of the mess in which we're currently living. Cousteau learned, even if it took a few decades for that lesson to come to him, and if one person can, there's little stopping anyone else from doing the same.

Until Cousteau reaches that revelation in his life, the documentary is fairly routine biography. Admirably, though, Garbus concentrates almost exclusively on the man's professional ambitions and accomplishments. That's what Cousteau is known for, and that's the story we want to see.

The approach might not have been an artistic decision, though. Based on how little Cousteau speaks of his past and his personal life in the interview footage and journal passages on display here, it's likely that Garbus' more work-based narrative is a matter of necessity. This is a man, after all, who apparently lived a double life without the public knowing or the people closest to him thinking much about it.

Cousteau, clearly, was a private man, and a lot of that seems to stem from the idea that he didn't find himself too interesting as a person. How could he or, for that matter, anyone, when constantly coming face-to-face with such wonders of nature?

Of the few personal details we do learn, the first is that Cousteau wanted to be a pilot and joined the French Navy to achieve that dream. A car accident, in which he broke multiple bones (including both arms), put an end to that ambition. Swimming for Cousteau began as a way to recuperate from his injuries.

The freedom of snorkeling led to a desire to dive deeper and more freely than with diving suits and their cumbersome connections to the surface. Cousteau helped create the first piece of scuba equipment, and for him, the rest probably could have been history from there. As related here, it's basically a historical and biographical footnote in Cousteau's story.

The same goes for much of the man's personal life, as he marries Simone Melchior, who came from a long line of sailors and only expected a life at sea from her husband, and the couple has two sons, Jean-Michel and Philippe. Garbus' storytelling rather subtly takes its subject's perspective in certain regards.

Philippe, for example, would gradually become his father's heir apparent, joining Cousteau on many adventures and, as a pilot, setting off on ones of his own. Such a life was never Jean-Michel's desire, so he almost immediately disappears from the film, only returning in the occasional photograph or a few pieces of voice-over. There's a matter-of-fact and sadly accurate dismissal of the son, because that's just how things were for Cousteau. If it didn't have to do with his work, it didn't matter. Call it impassioned dedication or passive cruelty, but that's just how Cousteau worked.

Most of the film, of course, details Cousteau's sea adventures, explorations of the deep, and devotion to capturing everything on camera (In addition to the scuba gear, he also helped revolutionize underwater cinematography, and Garbus is generous with that footage). All of it was funded by Cousteau's work with an oil company, searching for and finding oil beneath the floor of the Persian Gulf. As renown and fame came from his documentaries (The filmmaker preferred to call them "true adventure films") and a long-running network television show, he also started to see how much unregulated industry was changing the ecosystems beneath the surface.

Garbus clearly wants us to feel some optimism here, as Cousteau's outlook changes and he becomes active as an environmental ambassador of sorts. Even the film's final notes are hopeful, as a period of cynicism (both from personal tragedies and seeing underwater ecosystems transformed into deserts within a couple decades) gives way to encouraging developments. It's the correct tone for Becoming Cousteau, which shrewdly doubles as a piece of activism in its own right, but seeing how the concerns of decades ago have remained to this day, one can't help but feel the pessimistic Cousteau of the 1970s and '80s was right. Maybe the example of the more positive Cousteau on display here will change some hearts and prove that skepticism wrong.

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