Dir: Noah Baumbach, US 2005, 80 mins
Cast: Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney, Jesse Eisenberg, Owen Kline, Anna Paquin, William Baldwin
Review by Angus Macdonald
After winning a string of awards and festival prizes and garnering some of the most glowing word-of-mouth critical momentum in the States, Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale arrives in the UK to reassure audiences that the American independent film scene is not entirely disappearing up its own sense of pretentiousness. After the aesthetically playful and what many critics have thought of as self-satisfied quirky overkill of recent films, such as I Heart Huckabees, Garden State, and the Baumbauch co-scripted The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, the brilliant The Squid and the Whale is a refreshingly naturalistic, understated black comedy which relies more on its lovingly observed screenplay and some of the best performances seen in a long time.
Set in 1985, and based on Baumbach’s own experiences of his parents’ divorce, the film follows the Berkmans, a middle-class intellectual family in Brooklyn, whose separation is played out as a battle of jealousy, favouritism, and cruel nit-picking. This is set up in the opening scene when the family are playing tennis, Bernard (Daniels) and 16 year old Walt (Eisenberg) on one side and Joan (Linney) and 12 year old Frank (Kline) on the other. Bernard tells Walt where to hit the ball to take advantage of Joan’s weak side, and they proceed to smash the ball at her. In the first five minutes, the sides, the battles, the dirty tactics, and the fights for power to come are clearly established.
Bernard is a creative writing teacher and novelist in the middle of a creative slump threatened by Joan’s new-found literary success. When they decide to split, their two sons are shared on a weekly rota. Despite choosing which of their parents they would prefer to stay with, Frank with his mother and Walt with his father, the sharing time brings out the worst in both children.
The youngest begins to experiment with alcohol, swearing and profanity, and vandalistic masturbation. His time with his father is spent being fed beef cutlets that have fallen on the floor, playing aggressive ping-pong, or arguing about his desire to become a tennis coach like his friend (and Joan’s new boyfriend) Ivan (Baldwin). The eldest tries to become an intellectual like his father, falling into the trap of not knowing what he’s talking about, pomposity, and plagiarism. While trying to impress a girl by asking her if she likes Franz Kafka, she asks him if he has read Metamorphosis; he almost gives the game away with the reply, “It’s very Kafka-esque”. At a school concert, he tries to pass the Pink Floyd song Hey You off as his own, and later justifies his actions by saying, “I felt I could have written it – so the fact that it was already written was kind of a technicality.”
What makes his desire to be like his father so amusing and cringe-inducing is the continuous evidence that Bernard’s over-bearing and pompous intellectualism is itself bordering on being nothing more than an act. He is always criticising or trampling on other people’s ideas in poisonous bite-size chunks. When Walt says he has to read A Tale of Two Cities for a class report, Bernard puts him off by claiming it as “minor Dickens”; when invited to come to the cinema to watch Short Circuit, Bernard says, “I hear Blue Velvet’s supposed to be very good.” When he finds out that Joan has been seeing Ivan, he seems to be more upset that she’s chosen somebody of some intellectual standing – “Why, those jocks, they’re very uninteresting people.”
While this all makes for some uncomfortable and cringe-inducing viewing, it is also an extremely funny and ultimately moving film with some stunning performances all round. Perhaps most staggering of all is Daniels, playing against his usual nice, slightly wimpy, everyman type. His performance here as the demanding, grumpy, and threatened self-obsessed monster is an absolute joy.
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Sony Pictures Home Entertainment have announced the UK Region 2 DVD release of The Squid and the Whale for 7th August 2006 priced at £19.99.
Features include:
- 1.85:1 Anamorphic Widescreen
- English & Spanish DD5.1 Surround,li>English, Dutch, Hindi & Spanish subtitles,li>Audio Commentaries
- Behind-The-Scenes Featurette
- Interview With Director Noah Baumbach and Writer Phillip Lopate
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