The Squid and the Whale: Movie & DVD Review (2005)

(Originally published 2005)

The new Noah Baumbach movie, "The Squid and the Whale," is about a bickering New York couple married 17 years who decide to divorce. They are writers and they are academics--the worst sort of academics--inflated with ideas that are not their own, but which nevertheless inform their own empty rhetoric.

They may hail from Brooklyn's Park Slope, but there still is the sense about Bernard (Jeff Daniels) and Joan (Laura Linney) that they exist in a subdivision of Stepford, where residents are programmed to drop as many literary references as possible in an effort to elevate the illusion of their own intellect.

These are people who exist in metaphor. Their lives are abstract. They could stand before a mirror and see a host of better writers, critics and scholars staring back at them with disappointment. When Bernard and Joan have problems, they don't try to work them out by digging deep into the issues at hand. Instead, they either point toward a bookshelf and mention an author's name, usually Kafka's, or they explode into a passive-aggressive rage.

With their own metamorphosis at hand, this sudden, unwanted passion unfolding in their lives is proving no good for their children--16-year-old Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) and his younger brother, Frank (Owen Kline).

Caught in the middle, Walt and Frank are forced to watch their peculiar family dissolve, with Bernard and Joan making the pretentious mistake of treating each boy as their equal, and thus fully capable of understanding and accepting the complexities of what's to come, which isn't only cruel, but ridiculous.

Set in 1986 and based on Baumbach's script, itself mined from his own experiences as a child, "The Squid and the Whale" finds that Walt and Frank aren't about to take to their changes without a measure of rebellion.

Each takes sides--Walt with his father, who buys a shabby house across town "in the filet of the neighborhood" and who invites one of his sexy female students (Anna Paquin) to move in with them, and Frank with his mother, whose affair with a key character assists in Frank's increasingly shaky behavior, including drinking heavily at home and masturbating just about everywhere at school.

In this war their parents wrought, the kids hold their own as long as they can. But since no divorce is without its ramifications, "Squid" follows suit to show just how devastating its effects can be. There's nothing new in that, so what sets the movie apart is its caustic stripping down of the indignant, out-of-touch, selfish, false academic, a satisfying approach that generates interest because of the egos on display, and because of the egos eventually bashed.

If this movie feels emotionally removed, it's because its characters are emotionally stunted. Bernard and Joan are so suckered by the illusion of who they are, they can't see the irony of what they have become--a couple of animals caught in their own trap.

Grade: B+