Exquisitely painful and root-canal-jabbingly uncomfortable, The Squid and the Whale, a black comedy from writer-director Noah Baumbach, is based on his parents’ breakup. It is bittersweet without the sweet, and lets you know in a big way what people mean when they say divorce is ”traumatic”.
The unhappy tale is set in Brooklyn, New York City, in 1986, a pre-cellphone, pre-Internet era of typewriters and being unable to contact your teenage kids when they are not home. Baumbach has perhaps remembered this time via Woody Allen movies and Philip Roth novels from the same period and before. Or perhaps, scarily, he has just taken it directly from real life.
Jeff Daniels plays Bernard Berkman: an insufferably pompous, bearded novelist and creative writing professor, whose books are not selling any more. His wife Joan (Laura Linney) is on the verge of leaving him and has chosen this moment to become a successful novelist herself, with a piece of work about to be published in the New Yorker magazine, a distinction that has always eluded Bernard.
Their elder son is the 16-year-old Walt, played by Jesse Eisenberg — a callow young man who has mastered his father’s bogus air of authority in talking about literature. Walt instinctively takes his father’s side, while his younger brother, 12-year-old Frank (Owen Kline), sympathises with his mother.
The boys are old enough to be sexually aware, old enough to argue, confront their parents and feel desperately hurt, yet not old enough to move out or fully understand what is going on.
Just to compound the horror, Bernard’s sexy student Lili (Anna Paquin) moves into his bachelor establishment in which the boys spend half the week and, naturally, father and elder son lust after her equally — though without any emollient comic resolution.
The flashpoint for Bernard and Joan’s split is when he sees her working on a short story late one night. Daniels brilliantly conveys the writer’s natural flash of envy and fear at another writer’s successful productivity, and bullyingly asks his wife if she has incorporated the pedagogic ”note” he has given her on the piece. Nervous of the imminent storm, Joan meekly replies that she has taken ”some of it” on board, an obvious evasion that triggers a row. The explosion of argument propels Baumbach’s camera up to the boys’ point of view, as they hang around, terrified, at the top of the stairs, listening to the distant uproar. They understand this much: they are alone.
Failure at sex and failure at work are two parts of Bernard’s misery; the third is the lack of money. In front of the children, Joan accuses Bernard of applying for joint custody to halve his childcare bills, and the most deliciously embarrassing moment comes when he takes Walt and Walt’s nice girlfriend Sophie (Halley Feiffer) out for dinner. At the end of the meal, Bernard receives the bill. Sophie uncertainly reaches for her purse, takes out some cash, naturally expecting — with us — to be told by the successful grownup at any moment to put her money away. But Bernard wordlessly takes it, rigid with shame.
One of the movie’s incidental pleasures is wondering which of the two boys is the author himself: the older, screwed up by his sanctimonious dad? Or the younger, loyal to the mom, though with enough self-possession to correct her when she fondly varies his nickname from ”pickle” to ”piccolo”: this new version, he perhaps senses, is too tactlessly clear about his littleness.
The Squid and the Whale refreshingly sticks to the Seinfeld rule. No hugging, no learning. When Bernard succumbs to a medical crisis, he is overweening, self-important and conceited, even as he is carried into the ambulance on a stretcher. It has the authentic feeling of real-life messiness, humiliation and shame, though supercharged with fictional black comedy.
Before this, Baumbach was the screenwriter on Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou Anderson produces this movie, too — and his family issues found indirect expression in that whimsical comedy. Here they are agonisingly direct and very funny. All four family members give wonderful performances, especially Daniels as the monstrous novelist, desperately failing and flailing in confusion and fear. — Â