The Squid and the Whale

I just watched Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale. So good!m the writing, the directing, the acting, the editing, superb.

To be fair, this is pretty much my favourite kind of film. Primarily about the interrelationship of characters, arch and well-written dialogue, a fairly shallow story arc, and only incremental transformation of the characters. Nothing happens and everything happens. The storyline unfolds over a period of weeks, or perhaps a few months. A family disintegrates, brothers struggle to figure themselves out.

It's an excruciating portrait. The father, portrayed by Jeff Daniels, is such a heinous example of fatherhood one can't help but cringe throughout. The mother, played by Laura Linney, comes off as slightly more sympathetic, but even that, when you reflect upon it, is illusory. It was interesting for me, because in a lot of ways, this would have been my fantasy family in the eighties. A family of intellectuals, both parents have PhDs, living in a big city, conversations about foreign film and great literature over the breakfast table, my dream come true! The way the parents talk to the kids like they are peers, buddies, intellectual equals, every teenager's fantasy, no? But while Baumbach portrays all this, he also damns them by showing how thoroughly inappropriate it all is. How it really flatters the kids, how on some level they revel in it, but how, ultimately, it's this total abdication of parental responsibility that brutalizes them.

The treatment of the female characters is interesting, particularly in the early part of the film. The father demonizes the mother, and the eldest son, who touts his father's party line like a devotee, reinforces it. There are scens where the father counsels the son on relationships with women that display a callous disregard for women that makes my heart sink. Spoon-feeding him such garbage!

And yet, despite Baumbach's calculating eye, you can't help but embrace the humanity of each of the characters. I wouldn't go so far as to say that I felt any affection for the parents, but I ended up understanding some of their motivations. I felt like I could be in their skins a little, which rehabilitates them and makes them seem far worse, simultaneously.

Baumbach uses his location in an interesting way, too, the way that Brooklyn in the eighties was so distinct from Manhattan, so apart from the centre. It reinforces the way the father, a writer who had early success but hasn't published in some time, is apart from the centre and the mother, who is developing as a writer and has a piece published in the New Yorker, is moving towards it. Movement, subtle and sweeping movements, make up the core of the pieces in many ways.

Jesse Eisenberg as the eldest son Walt and Owen Kline as the younger Frank are brilliant. The music choices, including "Figure Eight" from the old School House Rocks

soundtrack is inspired. Even the editing is noticeably, remarkably good, lending a sort of dreamy quality that is unsettling without seeming disjointed.

See it in a double bill with:
Saturday Night Fever
Kramer vs. Kramer
Me and You and Everyone We Know
Thumbsucker