Noah Baumbach’s autobiographical film nails one family’s pain as the rules and rituals that used to hold it together fall apart.
By: Elise Nakhnikian
The Squid and the Whale traces the painful road to self-awareness that starts with a boy’s realization that his adored father is, not to put too fine a point on it, something of a jerk.
For Bernard Berkman (Jeff Daniels), a fading novelist and professor in 1980s Park Slope, "dense" is the ultimate compliment for a movie or book, popular taste is beneath contempt, and a schoolteacher’s warning about his son is not to be taken seriously if the teacher doesn’t have a Ph.D. Bernard’s 16-year-old son, Walt (Jesse Eisenberg), happily laps up his father’s predigested prejudices and spits them back out as his own. But his smug view of himself and his family or at least his father dissolves when his parents’ fraying marriage falls apart.
Even before the couple separates, the fault line between them is clear, and their sons have taken up their positions on either side. Walt’s 12-year-old brother, Frank (Owen Kline), identifies with their mother, Joan (Laura Linney), while Walt blames her for all their problems, simmering with self-righteous fury.
Writer-director Noah Baumbach nails the family’s pain as the rules and rituals that used to hold it together fall apart. While the adults act like children the kids spin out of orbit, and there’s no one there to catch them. Sometimes they stick up for each other, but more often they quarrel, caught up in their parents’ endless feud.
The raw emotions, relentless pace and grainy handheld Super 16 film feel rough and unstaged, making the occasional moments of absurdity as surprising as they are welcome.
Baumbach says his story is autobiographical in its emotions, if not in its facts, but plenty of the facts hit close to his home as well. Baumbach grew up in Brooklyn, his parents were both writers (his mother is Village Voice critic Georgia Brown) and divorced when he was a teen, and the Natural History Museum exhibit that gives the movie its title a giant squid fighting a sperm whale used to fascinate and frighten him when he was little, just as it did Walt in the movie.
Baumbach clearly identifies with the boys in his story, especially Walt. You can feel him tapping at your shoulder to make sure you got the point when Walt has an instantaneous epiphany with the therapist he’s sent to after getting in trouble at school, or Bernard keeps telling Walt not to get serious about the sweet girl he’s dating, urging him to "play the field." But the actors’ fidelity to their characters brings the Berkman family vividly to life even when the script verges on didacticism.
Eisenberg made a memorable debut as the uncle-worshipping nephew in Roger Dodger, another story about adults who let down the kids that look up to them. In that one he playing a wise child who followed his own humane instincts, but he faces a bigger challenge here: how to make the pompous, self-deluding Walt at least intermittently sympathetic. He’s up to the task, though, nailing Walt’s carefully faked, hunched-over pose of intellectual sophistication while intermittently signaling the confusion and insecurity beneath the arrogance.
It works because Eisenberg never makes a cheap play for our sympathy. Neither does Daniels. The older actor stays true to his character, proudly parading all the flaws that eventually disillusion his son while never once peeking out from behind Bernard’s narcissistic self-regard to wink at the audience. Linney is unflashily fine, too, as a woman who’s just starting to come into her own. Joan tries to do right by her children but often fails, not because she ignores their needs, but because she sometimes misreads them.
But the real standout in this outstanding crew may be Kline, whose Frank emerges as the soul of the family. Frank is as confused and unhappy as Walt after their parents’ breakup, but he remains true to himself, as fiercely faithful to his own instincts as he is to his embattled mother. Kline, whose lip frequently curls up at one end to express Frank’s growing skepticism, embodies his character’s integrity as well as his loneliness and sense of alienation. It’s a poignant portrayal of a stoic little boy trying to grow up as fast as he can. The child of a couple who are friends of Baumbach’s, Kline had never acted before, except in Baumbach’s wife Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Anniversary Party, but this role should generate offers from people outside his parents’ social circle.
All unhappy families may be unhappy in their own way, but The Squid and the Whale captures a sense of a world shaken loose from its moorings that will likely resonate for any child of divorce.
Rated R. Contains strong sexual content, graphic dialogue and language.