On Friday, after being turned away from the 1:30 showing of THE SQUID AND THE WHALE because of the Pavillion’s short-lived policy of not allowing strollers or large bags into the theater, I met my husband in front of the theater for the 4:30 show. This time, I brought a small purse as I was determined to see this movie.
When I got to the theater, I noticed a new sign posted, which said that the movie theater was now just checking all bags. The woman who turned me away at 1:30 looked a little sheepish when she saw me. She said that the manager who had put up the original sign had gone "a little overboard." She agreed that the policy of a few hours ago was "ridiculous."
The theater was more than half full: a mix of 20-somethings and middle-agers. We sat through trailers for "Shop Girl" and something called" North Country," a film with a strong "Norma Rae" vibe about a woman mine worker, starring Francis McDormand, Sissy Spacek, and Charlize Theron.
THE SQUID AND THE WHALE, directed by Noah Baumbach (pictured at left), is a scathing and, in the end, even loving indictment of two self-absorbed, intellectual Park Slope parents who separate after 16 years of marriage. Their shared custody arrangement wreaks havoc on the emotional lives of their children. Frank, the younger son, who is more comfortable with his mother, embarks on a strange, pre-adolescent sexual odyssey. Walt, the older son, who idolizes and imitates his father, finds himself struggling through his first relationship, simulating his father’s putrid attitude toward woman, and indirectly blaming his girlfriend for his mother’s betrayal.
The mom, played by Laura Linney, is a not altogether flattering portrait of a woman who, after years of infidelity, asks her husband, a once-sucessful novelist and creative writing teacher, for a divorce.
The father, like the mother, is so realistically and specifically rendered as a character, that, while mostly unlikable and pompous, it is impossible to believe that he does not exist. Indeed, the film is a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age narrative of Baumbach, who himself grew up in Park Slope of the 1980’s.
The painful pleasures of this film are many. Vignette after vignette, every scene drips with diaglogue and situations that are astutely specific to life in a certain milieu of brownstone Brooklyn. The director manages to create a spot-on replica of the world of 1980’s Park Slope; the shakey-cam photography captures the rapturous autumn colors, the landmark beauty and discreet melancholy of the neighborhood and its brownstones.
Slope viewers will delight in a guessing game of: What street is that? Which school? Where is that house? Sighs of recognition were audible in the theater throughout the film; they accompanied the sighting of a familiar building or the versimilitude of a phrase or a concept that, in its odd eccentricity, is only possible in Park Slope.
The Slope of the THE SQUID AND THE WHALE is a Slope where struggling writers and creative writing teachers can afford to buy a brownstone. Parking is a never-ending hassle and the streets are littered with Volvos and Peugeots. There are no strollers, or cafes, or Music Together classes. The parents are "sixties people," who firmly believe in the value of their personal actualization and creative expression.
1970’s feminism and sexual liberation are what fuels the world-view of these parents. Coming out of their own repressive childhoods, this generation wanted a different life for themselves and their children. If this meant too much sexal honesty and inappropriate conversational tropes, so be it.
The matter of fact way that these parents tell their children they are divorcing is especially chilling. "Aren’t most of the kids in your class divorced?" one of the parents asks as if to normalize the situation. The way in which these unwittingly narcissistic characters completely
ignore the real needs of their children, who are struggling mightily and
paying the price of the break up of the marriage, is devastating.
These are not 1990’s parents, who agree to put their careers on hold in order to sing along with their kids at Music for Aardvarks or watch them ride Little Tikes trikes at the Beth Elohim drop-in center. The child-centered world of contemporary Park Slope is a sensibility away from this movie.
It’ll be interesting to see, in years to come, the coming-of-age movies that are made about the child-centered world of 1990’s Park Slope. These films will probably be equally scathing and hopefully no less artful.
At the heart of the film are the two sons, Frank and Walt, who are the victims of their parent’s marital quagmire. While the parents believe that it is possible to equitably split up the week into equal parcels, they give little thought to the toll this will take on their sons. When the father buys a fixer-upper house n Ditmas Park one of the boys says, "Is that even in Brooklyn?"
The boys are realer than real (and stranger than strange) in the way that children are. Sometimes unlikable, unpleasant, hopelessly sad, and unintentionally funny, these are not the treacly sweet children of so many films. These are real kids, with real issues, and real scars from the well-meaning lives their parents have given them.
Anna Paquin, as one of the father’s creative writing students who moves into his house, says at one point in the film : "There are the kinds of families that allow soda and sweet cereal and those that don’t." Walt and Frank are from the no soda and sweet cereal kind of family. They are also not supped to use paper towels to clean up a spill. In a heartbreaking effort not to disappoint the father he adores, Walt removes a piece of paper towel from the garbage. Theirs are parents who are nutritionally and environmentally correct, but give little thought to the ways that their actions hurt their children.
Both Laura Linney and Jeff Daniels are so believable as the parents that they ultimately reveal themselves to be appealingly flawed. Like any great fictional creations, they are textured and "dense" as the father would say. Warts and all, we can all see ourselves in them as we can poignantly relate to the plight of their boys.
I left the theater still feeling connected to the characters I had just seen on screen. I also felt a twinge of excitement that a film so well-written and quirky was made out of the morass of a Park Slope childhood. I wondered what people who don’t live in Brooklyn, let alone New York, will make of this fractured family, where the children drink beer, discuss whether "A Tale of Two Cities," is a minor work of Dickens, and decide which days their cat will live in which parent’s house.
The Squid and the Whale is, in a way, a tale of two cities within one broken family. It elucidates the way that parent’s conflicts can manifest themselves in a child’s psyche and create a schisim. The ability to understand the blows of childhood and transform it into a work of art is, thankfully, what Baumbach has achieved. And we are the richer for it.