Let me begin by saying that, previous to viewing The Squid and the Whale, I thought the film would be a Wes Anderson style production, full of quirks and whimsy. While the quirks are intact, whimsy is nowhere to be found. Instead, the film is a wrenchingly truthful account of a family falling apart at the hands of a painful divorce. The most difficult scenes to watch are the ones that ring true. We've all seen families like this before, where the parents treat their kids like regular adults instead of growing adolescents.
Writer/Director Noah Baumbach- who co-wrote Anderson's The Life Aquatic- based much of the material on his own life growing up in Brooklyn and it shows through every scene and character. The characters are dense and complex, not exactly likable or unlikable. Despite all of the awful things some of them say or do, you don't hate anyone for it. They are all a victim of circumstance. But the moral ambiguity isn't calculated like this year's Oscar winner Crash, where the main characters all suddenly turn good after one experience. The Squid and the Whale explains this family in terms of real life; people do both good and bad things but no one is intrinsically good or evil.
The film begins in 1986 Brooklyn when the Berkman clan is still a complete whole. Bernard (Jeff Daniels) and Joan (Joan Allen) have an average marriage and the kids, Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) and Frank (Owen Kline) seem normal enough. However, the seams come undone when Bernard finds out that his wife has been cheating on him for years. The family soon gathers in the living room for a chat about the inevitable divorce. While it's heartbreaking to see Frank devastated over the news, the scene also carries a darkly comic touch. Walt brings up all of these scenarios which the parents haven't though of, concerning pickup times and other seemingly trivial matters. This shows how much an extreme change divorce forces a person to make and sometimes, in this case, they don't realize how much it really will be different.
After the split, the kids begin spending part of the week at their father's dilapidated house, complete with crumbling wallpaper and no furniture. While staying there, Bernard tells his kids all the dirt on their mother in graphic detail. She has begun dating the kid's geeky tennis instructor, played by Stephen Baldwin, in an uncharacteristically goofy turn.
Eventually the two kids pledge their allegiance to opposite parents, with Walt going with dad and Frank with mom. Like many real dysfunctional homes, the parents seize on this loyalty by turning their kids against each other, like forming alliances.
Walt and Frank's temperaments change drastically following the divorce. Walt is prone to searing insults, especially to his girlfriend Sophie, who he feels is inferior intellectually to him. Frank goes through the biggest change since he's still trying to figure himself out at his young age (I'd say around 10 or 11). While being left home alone at long intervals he starts to drink beer and whiskey and shows some bizarre sexual behavior.
Watching Frank decline is the hardest to take because, at the beginning, he seems so innocent and cute. After watching him masturbate in the back of a library and wipe his ejaculate on the books, it's difficult to look at him the same way.
Much of the kids' problems arise from their families' strident intellectualism. Their parents are both cynical writers and their personalities rub off on their offspring. Walt especially takes on this behavior as he believes that he can't relate to other kids his age because they've never read Kafka. The problem is that Walt has never actually read Kafka but wants to exude the appearance of being smarter than everyone else.
The performances in this film are the best ensemble acting I've seen in years. Daniels and Allen continue to be the two most underrated actors in Hollywood. The argument scenes are some of the most realistic and intense you'll ever see. Both Eisenberg and Kline are simply amazing as the kids. Eisenberg's Walt seems like an adult trapped in a pre-teen's body as he calmly reduces every disaster as a matter of logic. As the tortured Frank, Kline reaches depths of creepiness and despair that I didn't think were possible for a child that young.
The Squid and the Whale isn't for the faint of heart because of both its subject matter and the way it's expressed. Be advised that the film is deeply serious and there are some scenes that may be too intense and real to handle. It's definitely a film that will stay in your head for weeks.
"The Squid and the Whale" opens October 5, 2005 and is rated R. Drama. Written and directed by Noah Baumbach. Starring Anna Paquin, Jeff Daniels, Jesse Eisenberg, Laura Linney, Owen Kline, William Baldwin.
