The Squid and the Whale - The Atlanta Journal-Constitution movie review

'The Squid and the Whale': A family tragedy in miniature

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Hilarious, harrowing and heartbreaking, "The Squid and the Whale" is one of the best movies of the year.

Named after the diorama at the venerable Museum of Natural History in New York in which those mortal enemies of the sea are locked in eternal combat, writer-director Noah Baumbach's semi-autobiographical dissection of a family in meltdown is graced with whip-smart dialogue, dipped-in-acid observations and extraordinary performances — including a career-defining one by Jeff Daniels.

Samuel Goldwyn Films

'The Squid and the Whale'

The verdict: Excruciatingly funny, sometimes just excruciating this brilliant, unsparing look at a family's meltdown is one of the best pictures of the year.

Director: Noah Baumbach
Starring: Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney, Jesse Eisenberg, Owen Kline, Anna Paquin
Run time: 88 minutes
Release date: Oct. 5, 2005
Rating: R for strong sexual content, graphic dialogue and language.
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The setting is Park Slope, Brooklyn, in 1986, where battle lines are drawn between Bernard Berkman (Daniels) and his wife, Joan (Laura Linney). He's a pretentious, once-famous novelist who now teaches college-level creative writing as his career slides into oblivion. She has just started to write and already is the Hot New Thing, with a piece in the New Yorker and a book on the way.

This doesn't sit well with their 16-year-old Dad-worshipping son Walt (Jesse Eisenberg), who insists Dad's the writer in the family, not mom. But maybe she's better, counters his 12-year-old brother Frank (Owen Kline), who's a mama's boy in a good way.

Before long, it's time for the Meeting — the one every child of divorce has encrypted on his or her heart. Mom and dad are separating. It has nothing to do with you boys. We both love you very much. Blah. Blah. Blah.

Like the childish narcissists they are, Bernard and Joan decide on the worst kind of joint custody — the kind that shuttles the boys back and forth between houses every day. What about the family cat, wails Frank. Slight moment of panic. OK, he'll go back and forth, too. Ironically, it's the feline's forced mobility that brings about the movie's unexpected climax.

Bernard takes a place across the park in what he calls "the filet of the neighborhood." In actuality, it's a decrepit, crumbling-down house, and his attempts to make it "homey" are a disaster — and a painful indication of what kind of father he's been. A poster of Ilie Nastase hangs in Frank's room. Frank hates Nastase. "Well, I couldn't find Vitas Gerulitis," Bernard says defensively.

Meanwhile, Joan takes a lover — Ivan (William Baldwin), the boy's laid-back tennis coach who addresses everyone as "my brother." We also learn Joan has had previous lovers, even while still married to Bernard.

Most of the movie is about the ruinous effect the Berkmans' ruined marriage has on their sons. Frank begins acting out sexually in very inappropriate ways. For his part, Walt echoes his father's pompous pronouncements. ("A Tale of Two Cities" is "minor Dickens"). His devotion is so consuming because, well, if he saw Bernard as he truly is, he might as well be an orphan. So, he chooses not to see the cracks — even when Bernard signs one of his first editions for Walt by scrawling, "Best wishes," then adds "Dad." In parentheses.

"The Squid and the Whale" is full of such punch-in-the-soul moments. It's so emotionally dense, yet also excruciatingly funny, it's hard to categorize. Something like "Sideways," perhaps, but in an entirely different context.

Like "Sideways'" director, Alexander Payne — and James L. Brooks and Robert Benton — Baumbach has a knack for eliciting great individual performances within a seamless ensemble framework. Baldwin gives a very funny performance; who knew he had this much wit and skill in him? Anna Paquin is teasingly right as a sexually sure-of-herself student who settles at Bernard's when she's between apartments — or, more likely, boyfriends.

Linney is like a one-woman repertory company. She can play anything, and here she manages to be nurturing, angry, funny, defensive, worried and warm-hearted all at once. Eisenberg makes Walt both a decent kid and a spiteful snob, especially when it comes to his mother. And Kline, the son of Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates, more than holds his own in such demanding company.

But it's Daniels who cuts to the bone ... and beyond. He gives a bravado portrayal of an insecure, self-absorbed egotist He plunges into Bernard's unstable center and finds a man who's incapable of admitting the truth to himself — though he knows it as well as he knows the first sentence of his first novel. That he's a failure and, worse, has failed everyone around him. So he takes out his disappointment and rage by slamming a tennis ball off his wife's head or throwing a temper tantrum over losing a parking space. He makes himself feel intellectually superior and socially important by referring to a pretty nurse as a young Monica Vitti or going on about a girl he met at George Plimpton's party who wanted to sleep with him.

"The Squid and the Whale" is a family tragedy in miniature, constructed out of glances and words and tennis serves. It tells us parents are only human ... even when they're being inhuman.