By turns wryly amusing and painful, The Squid and the Whale is the year's most meticulously detailed, deeply personal and magnificently neurotic account of a family splitting apart at the seams.
Director Noah Baumbach (who, just on the strength of this and his earlier Mr. Jealousy, has got to be considered one of the most promising filmmakers in America) uses his own family as source material for the Berkmans, a Brooklyn-based clan bound for glorious things, if disaster doesn't get them first. The family members are a bright, talented bunch headed up by a mother and father (Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney) who are both writers, one whose star is rising, one with a star seriously falling, and whose marriage is well on the way to its messy end.
That doesn't translate well for the two Berkman boys — 12-year-old Frank (Owen Kline) and older brother Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) — as they struggle with the gravitational pull of screwed-up, hyper-intellectual parents and adjust to the unpleasant, absurd realities of divorce.
There's a lot of very curious psychological hoodoo going down here, with love and hate freely co-mingling in the family members' relationships with one another. The worlds of mind and body co-mingle constantly as well (for a family of Kafka-loving eggheads, these people do an awful lot of obsessing over sex), and the movie lays it all out in a collection of small, telling moments.
The Squid and the Whale is a delicate film about people who are often brutally honest, with Baumbach managing to find something appealing and even endearing in characters who are frequently selfish, arrogant and flat-out pretentious. The movie is well under 90 minutes long but every one of those minutes counts. To use a word favored by several of the Berkmans, this is one "dense" script. And this is one seriously funny and very special movie. Also stars William Baldwin and Anna Paquin.
This article appears in Nov 23-29, 2005.