Movie Review |
Life with Father: The Squid and the Whaleby George Sax |
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The Squid and the Whale is the kind of film that’s called “autobiographical” or “thinly fictionalized.” (One writer has dubbed it a “thinly fictionalized autobiographical film.”) Much of the interest it’s attracted has been aroused by its source material: The family history of writer-director Noah Baumbach and his depiction of a character who is an exaggerated version of his father, the novelist Jonathan Baumbach. Given the extremes to which he has gone to portray his old man unflatteringly, the most interesting aspect of this comedy’s production may be the older man’s reported approval of the results.
Squid (the title alludes to a marine exhibit in New York’s Museum of Natural History) depicts several months in the lives of the Berkman family in Brooklyn, ca. 1986, as the parents (Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney) divorce and attempt to maintain a civilized joint supervision of their two sons, Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) and Frank (Owen Kline). In this, they fail even more miserably than they did at marriage. Walt is a stand-in for the director at sixteen, and his is the dominant point-of-view in the movie.
The Berkmans occupy a privileged, if not rarified, station in American life: Bernard is a novelist-academician, albeit one whose literary career seems at a disquieting impasse. Just as he finds the critics and reading public uninterested in his efforts, his wife seems to be on the verge of initial success in a new writing career.
In a more tempered movie, this divergence in fortunes might be an important comic dynamic. But Baumbach’s interest seems to be elsewhere. He seems fixed on casting his resentful focus on the old man, and maybe even on some payback.
Bernard is such an overweening exemplar of needy self-regard and emotional domination of family life, that these career developments are scarcely more than minor notes. Bernard isn’t really abusive; he’s unable to conceive of other lives as being outside the orbit of his anxious ego. And he sees himself as reasonable and liberal in his approach to the other Berkmans.
Indeed, when he realizes that his wife is being unfaithful, he reacts only with modest anger and acted-out hurt. Spying her talking to another man as he drives with Walt, he asks his son, “What was she wearing?” and adds, in some kind of trifling self-reassurance, “Oh, I’ve seen that one.”
Bernard is a kind of parody of the free-range uber-criticality that certainly can be found in academia. And this part is the most pointedly funny of Baumbach’s work in Squid. Walt is in thrall to his father’s self-promotional shows of expertise. He pays rapt attention to Bernard opining that a class-assigned A Tale of Two Cities is “minor Dickens,” while David Copperfield is “much richer.”
It’s not that Bernard is wrong; it’s that he’s so stridently banal. He even critiques his wife’s lovers. He refers to one as a “philistine,” a term he helpfully explains to his sons as someone who isn’t interested in books and good films. At the same time, he is quite capable of inscribing Walt’s copy of one of his books with “Best Wishes,” and, in an afterthought, “(Dad).”
The family’s tennis coach, Ivan (William Baldwin), isn’t “serious,” a benighted state which may compel the intensely competitive Bernard to unwisely try to show-up some alleged deficiency in the pro’s game. Ivan, who seems to be the most uncalculatingly generous person in the movie, good-naturedly brushes this on-court challenge aside with a few deft strokes.
The boys’ mother, who at first seems more put upon than victimizer, is soon enough seen to have her own confusions about the roles of parent and child. She doesn’t grasp the respective functions of affectionate familiarity and boundaries. As the marriage dissolves, Frank is wakened one night by her as she hides books under his bed so his father won’t try to claim them. Both of these combatants have enlisted the kids as incestuous co-conspirators in their marriage and divorce follies.
There’s undeniable humor in these escapades, as this family romance goes clinically haywire, but I found it increasingly unpleasant. Bernard is such an unredeemed caricature that the movie feels as if Baumbach is inviting us to a delectation of his embedded grudges and embroidered stories of egregious dysfunction. When neither parent notices that thirteen-year-old Frank is turning to alcohol and compulsive auto-eroticism, evidence of which he maliciously leaves in the corridors of his school, the movie becomes more unsettling than satiric.
Director Wes Anderson, one of this film’s producers, several years ago made The Royal Tenenbaums, a spoofy, wittily bent, and carefully whimsical comedy about a scarcely believable family of mutually at-odds eccentrics. Squid is more believable, but considerably less pleasurable and I’m not sure its revealed secrets and insights are worth the ride.
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