The Squid and the Whale

The Squid and the Whale (2005)
Director: Noah Baumbach
Actors: Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney, Jesse Eisenberg

Synopsis: A number of months in the lives of Brooklyn couple, Bernard (Jeff Daniels) and Joan (Laura Linney), and their two teenage sons, as they go through a messy separation.

Review: Less a fully realised dissection of the intricate fault lines of a family coming apart at the seams after parental separation, and more an elegiac – almost whimsical – snapshot of those events, The Squid and the Whale was the film where writer-director Noah Baumbach really hit the big time and established his own signature away from the brand of his frequent collaborator, Wes Anderson.

This foggy, refracted scenario reaps rewards in the way that it subtly honours the child’s eye view by being sensual and timeless; much how we might remember our own teenage years – as one long inscrutable haze of pleasure and pain. There are lots of continuity shifts and jump cuts (months pass between certain scenes in the film), and as opposed to Wes Anderson’s exquisitely calibrated sensibility mining the themes of nostalgia and sentimentality, Baumbach goes marginally more toward the conventionally dramatic and less affected for a similar end goal. He’s helped by a series of staggeringly assured performances. Jeff Daniels, in particular, nails his portrayal of the ramshackle, conceitedly deadpan father. It’s deceptively clever in that the trap with the role would have been to play into the idea of his character’s grotesque self-absorption, but Daniels keeps it a remove from that, enabling his character to have a pathos-infused dose of partial catharsis by the close.

The film generally feels better when it’s more impressionistic and there’s less exposition. Towards the end, Baumbach gets a little bogged down in the dramaturgy of the divorce politics of the piece, and some of the eldest son’s travails (well essayed by Jesse Eisenberg) feel a little prescribed to reveal some pat moral about the psychological effect of parental discord. That aside, this is a warm, measured little ballad about the exquisitely sad whimsy of seeing the sanctity of your parent’s union fall catastrophically down. (September 2017)