I assume I’m not the only one waiting with baited breath for the Brooklyn opening of THE SQUID AND THE WHALE. The film, which opens today Manhattan, is about the breakup of a family in 1980’s Park Slope. Written by Noam Baumbach, who grew up in the Slope, it was filmed all over the Slope in the last year or so. I remember seeing trailers and film permits around that said: The Squid and Whale and thinking: WTF? Seems that A.O. Scott, New York Times movie reviewer and resident of Lefferts Gardens, liked the film quite a bit. If it is playing a it was playing (which it isn’t) at BAM or the Pavillion tomorrow I am going would have gone to see it during the day. That’s how much I want to see this movie. Damn, why is it opening only in Manhattan? Here is Scott’s review in Wednesday’s New York TImes.
One of the ruling assumptions of American popular culture – or at
least of American independent movies – is that everyone’s adolescence
is uniquely miserable. Coming of age, with its attendant thrills and
traumas (generally summarized under the headings school, sex and
parents), is an inexhaustible subject because no two people go through
it in exactly the same way. Once we’re safely afloat in adulthood,
though, we can begin to recognize the universality of our earlier
experiences, and we can be grateful when, amid all the prurience and
sentimentality that attend representations of adolescence, someone
manages to get it right.This is what Noah Baumbach has done in "The Squid and the Whale," his fourth feature as a director (after "Kicking and Screaming," "Highball" and "Mr. Jealousy")
and a superior example of a familiar genre. Or as one of the film’s
characters might put it, the "filet" of Sundance-beloved troubled-teen
cinema. Told largely from the point of view of Walt Berkman (Jesse
Eisenberg), a 16-year-old enduring the breakup of his parents’ marriage
in mid-1980’s Park Slope, Brooklyn, "The Squid and the Whale" is both
sharply comical and piercingly sad. Mr. Baumbach surveys the members of
the flawed, collapsing Berkman family with sympathy but without mercy,
noting their individual and collective failures and imperfections with
relentless precision.
"Mom and me versus you and Dad." Those
words, spoken by Walt’s younger brother, Frank (Owen Kline), on a
tennis court, are the first we hear, and they set the stage for what is
to follow. After they split, the boys’ parents, Bernard and Joan, work
out a complicated, obsessively equitable joint-custody arrangement (it
even covers the cat), but they can hardly prevent the boys from
choosing sides. Frank is more comfortable with Joan (Laura Linney),
whose infidelities appear to have precipitated the separation, while
Walt is his father’s angry partisan, as well as his devoted acolyte.Bernard (Jeff Daniels),
a novelist and creative writing teacher whose career has faltered, is a
fountain of pompous judgments – the kind of man who can refer to Franz
Kafka as "one of my predecessors" and dismiss "A Tale of Two Cities"
as "minor Dickens" – which his older son has a habit of parroting. The
film’s narrative, a swift-moving series of short, pointed vignettes,
traces the decay of Walt’s view of Bernard, from worship to
protectiveness to disillusionment. At the same time, Walt’s initial
fury at Joan softens, and by the end you have the feeling that he will
eventually be able to accept his parents for who they are, a difficult
and necessary accomplishment of maturity.Not that Mr. Baumbach,
whose own Park Slope childhood lies a film-strip’s breadth beneath the
surface of this picture, wraps everything up neatly. Family life, under
the best of circumstances, is messy, and for all their sophistication
and good taste, the Berkmans are an unruly and contentious bunch.
Joan’s fledgling literary efforts turn out to be quite successful, and
at times she and Bernard appear to be enacting a Brooklyn-bohemian
remake of "A Star Is Born."That they are both writers is
hardly incidental. Intellectual pride and creative ambition are woven
into the family’s identity. Bernard worries that Frank, who is 12 and
who admires his oafish tennis instructor, Ivan (Billy Baldwin), is not
sufficiently serious, while Walt, desperate for acknowledgment as an
artist, passes off Pink Floyd’s "Hey You" as his own composition at a
school talent show. He also mimics Bernard’s hypercritical,
contemptuous manner with his sweet-natured girlfriend, Sophie (Halley
Feiffer), whom he may also be punishing for Joan’s transgressions.There
is more, including Frank’s horrifyingly funny sexual awakening, Walt
and Bernard’s infatuation with one of Bernard’s students (Anna Paquin, who played Mr. Daniels’s daughter in Carroll Ballard’s "Fly Away Home"),
and Joan’s affair with Ivan. All of it is handled with a slightly
breathless intelligence. Neither the camera nor the actors ever stop
moving, as though Mr. Baumbach, in addition to depicting Walt’s
desperate impatience, were also drawing on it as a stylistic and
emotional resource.His writing respects the prickly
individuality of the characters – in particular the adults, who fall
into habits of speech that seem like self-conscious tics to everyone
but them. (Joan calls her boys Chicken and Pickle; Bernard is overly
fond of that filet metaphor.) Ms. Linney is, as ever, charming and a
little elusive, which fits Joan’s defensive reserve. Much as she adores
her sons, Joan pulls away from them a bit to assert her independence
from Bernard, whose needy narcissism has clearly worn out her patience.
As well it might – and yet Mr. Daniels, while clearly delineating
Bernard’s self-deluding vanity, makes him neither a monster nor a
clown. He is, almost in spite of himself, a man of feeling, not above
appealing to the pity of those he loves when he can no longer impress
or intimidate them."The Squid and the Whale" is hard on him,
but it does not let anyone else, young or old, off the hook. Its
portrayal of a particular slice of the New York middle class at a
recent moment in history is precise, but such accuracy is not the point
of the exercise. The film’s tableau of domestic absurdity is likely to
tickle, and also to lacerate, anyone who has either raised a child or
been one. The last scenes strike a clean, discordant note of
devastating optimism: you have a feeling that Walt will be just fine,
which is to say that he will grow to be just as screwed up as his
parents, but in his own unique way."The Squid and the Whale"
is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian).
Adults must be protected from the uncomfortable insights it may offer
their children – especially those between ages 13 and 16 – into the
nature of parenthood.The Squid and the Whale
Opens today in Manhattan.
Written and directed by Noah Baumbach; director of photography, Robert Yeoman; edited by Tim Streeto; music by Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips; production designer, Anne Ross; produced by Wes Anderson, Peter Newman, Charles Corwin and Clara Markowicz; released by Samuel Goldwyn Films. Running time: 88 minutes.
WITH: Jeff Daniels (Bernard Berkman), Laura Linney (Joan Berkman), Jesse Eisenberg (Walt Berkman), Owen Kline (Frank Berkman), Anna Paquin (Lili), Billy Baldwin (Ivan) and Halley Feiffer (Sophie).