The Squid and the Whale

The back of the Squid and the Whale DVD calls the film "autobiographical" for writer/director Noah Baumbach. Hopefully, he means simply that his parents were divorced, or that they were writers. (I recall reading an interview with him years ago, following his impressive debut film Kicking and Screaming, in which he mentions that his father was a novelist, so at least that much is true). Hopefully, Noah Baumbach doesn't have memories of growing up with a man resembling the movie character of Bernard (Jeff Daniels) as a father.

An utterly irredeemable shit, Bernard as played by Daniels is an incessantly petty, pompous, juvnile and egomaniacal novelist. He takes out all of his frustration and anger at failing to get his latest work published on his wife and children. He lusts after his young female students, and brags to his sons that he's had the opportunity to bed numerous such co-eds in his time. He fired his former writing agent, we're told, because the man made a disparaging comment about The Knicks.

A film that's attempting to look, up close, at the dissolution of a family, The Squid and the Whale pretty quickly becomes an examination of a perfectly awful individual and how he ruins the sanity and well-being of all those around him. I've seen Daniel's performance praised in print repeatedly since the film opened last fall, and it's certainly a funny and memorable turn, but I'm not sure Bernard is, in fact, a believable or nuanced character. He's a bit too one-note to really seem like a fit for the rest of Baumbach's carefully-observed and painstakingly-recreated 1980's Brooklyn. Like a cartoon monster trapped in real-life Tokyo, Bernard clashes with his surroundings immediately - a hyperbole of narcissism within a film that's otherwise muted and dry.



For reasons both obvious and well-hidden, Bernard's wife Joan (Laura Linney) has decided to leave him. They move to separate houses and agree to trade off custody of their two sons, Walt (Jesse Eisenberg, of Roger Dodger) and Frank (Owen Kline, Phoebe Cates' and Kevin Kline's son), on alternating days. The film mainly concerns itself with the fallout of this change in living situations, particularly in how it affects the mental stability and outlooks of Walt and Frank.

At first, the boys choose sides, with Walt placing the fault at the feet of his mother while the more emotional Frank seems almost afraid of Bernard's intensity. To his credit, Baumbach keeps things pretty subtle and realistic, at least as far as the boys reactions go. There aren't a lot of screaming temper tantrums and heart-to-heart mother-child dialogues. Instead, he seems to understand that these Big Problems integrate themselves with the daily business of living, how they pepper the kid's thoughts in the background while they go about their lives at school and home.

It's just...well...I can't help but think the story would have more resonance if Bernard weren't such a monster. The title (which directly references a display at the Natural History museum showing a large whale and squid battling for supremacy) indicates the presence of these TWO giants in the boys' lives - their mother and father - and the tug-of-war that ensues when the family splits up. But the dynamic of a squid in the whale indicates a binary opposition - the boys are pulled between two equal forces, Mom and Dad.

But in reality, Bernard kind of dominates the conversation. Sure, Joan has her faults too. Bernard confesses to Walt early on that his wife cheated on him, a few times, and one of Daniel's few moments in the film that could be considered genuinely human finds him looking hurt while castigating his wife for infidelity. (Of course, rather than tell her how much he cares about her, or how she made him feel, he references how the infidelity was personally "humiliating.") And Joan confesses to Walt that she's aware of her unfortunate tendency to say things in ways that make her son uncomfortable.

But still, this is not a fair fight. Any child would have no choice but to side with Mom on this one, what with Dad dropping the veal cutlets on the ground before serving them, molesting his students in the house and gloating after kicking your ass at ping pong. So what begins as a movie about the effects of divorce on kids - how it makes them question their own identity and their place in the world - becomes a character study about a particularly egregious asshole.

The thing's definitely worth seeing, however, for the highly amusing Daniels performance alone. As well, I really enjoyed Robert Yeoman's cinematography. He shoots all of Wes Anderson's films (Wes is an executive producer on the movie, and Baumbach co-wrote his Life Aquatic in 2004), and his bright, kinetic work here recalls one of the previous highlights in his extensive filmography - Gus Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy.

The performance, the cinematography and even a great classic rock-heavy soundtrack just aren't enough to tip this over into the unequivocal success column. At least, for me. Considering that the movie can't even hit 80 minutes, I don't think I'm out of line calling it a bit slight. Brisk and entertaining, sure, but just a bit thin for a feature. I fully expected an extra 10 or 15 minutes at the end there, possibly an attempt to give Bernard a little more depth. As it is, it's just a nice, occasionally funny movie about an extremely horrible individual wrecking havoc on the lives of his so-called "loved ones."