The Squide and the Whale (2005)

8/1/06

Baumbach, an associate of director Wes Anderson, has made a film drawn in part from his own childhood experiences. The Squid and the Whale is a metaphor for the strange and hostel divorce of a pair from the New York literary set. Set in 1986 the film stars Jeff Daniels as Bernard Berkman, a has been novelist and professor of creative writing who is separating from his wife of 17 years Joan Berkman (Laura Linny), herself an author whose own career has just started its rise. Caught in the separation between their pompous and superior father, and well meaning but adulterous mother are Walt (Jesse Eisnberg) and Frank (Owen Kline) Berkman. During the coarse of the divorce both children come to cling to and idealize one of their parents, for Walt that's his 'brilliant' father, for Frank his caring mother. Both children act out in their own ways, with Franks (remember he's about 12) drinking and sexual fixations being particularly disturbing.

The relationship in the film that I found most fascinating however was Bernard and Walt's. I can understand how Walt came to worship the man, his embodiment of a supposedly liberated and cuttingly honest kind of intellectuailsm, holds a strange attraction to certain types of people. Yet despite his pretension, Bernard is by far the needyest and most self obsessed of all the characters in the film, as he tries to mold his oldest son to live the kind of life his bitterness has lead him to wish he'd lived in hindsight. When a young graduate student (Anna Paquin) moves into an empty room at Bernards new home, the mutual attraction father and son share for the girl leads to an odd, uneasy, and unspoken competition between the two, as well as Walt's break up with his girlfriend (Halley Feiffer). The Squid and the Whale does a real good job of putting you into these characters world, and at about 80 minutes runs at a perfect pace.