The Squid and the Whale

Finally doing what hundreds of critics have been telling me to do, today I saw Noah Baumbach's hilariously sad "The Squid and the Whale" and I cannot figure out why it took me so long.
(OK, I know why it took me so long; only recently did it start showing in a theater close to my house...there are only a very few moves that will get me on a bus and they'd better be longer than an hour and a half)

"The Squid and the Whale" is the story of a family going thru a divorce in the mid 1980's. Both parents, played by Laura Linney and Jeff Daniels, have PhD's in English and while Bernard's literary career is dying out, Joan's is just taking flight. They have 2 sons, Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) who is in high school and his younger brother Frank (Owen Kline). Whereas Frank is hurt by the divorce, but willing to go with the flow for the most part, Walt immediately sides with his father whom he idolizes completely. Rather than read a book or watch a movie and formulate his own opinion, Walt adopts his father's bombastic and pretentious opinions as his own. When he tells a girl he's interested in that the F. Scott Fitzgerald book she loved so much was only one of Fitzgerald's minor works and that Gatsby is his crowning achievement, the humor lies in the fact that we know he's never read either.

This quiet little movie contained more truth about life and our feelings of guilt, pain, loss, love, and happiness than almost any other film this year. Based on the writer/director's own childhood experiences, he captured the honesty that can be revealed in times of crisis. When Bernard tells Walt about Joan's extra-marital activities, and Walt then goes to Joan and throws them back in her face, the barrage of emotions Laura Linney displays perfectly echoes the reaction of someone who is simultaneously hurt and utterly pissed off.

And while the bulk of the film revolves around the reactions to the divorce, the film is also dedicated to that moment in life when you realize that your parents aren't perfect. Each of us at some point in our lives is faced with that completely devastating moment when we realize that our mother and father might not belong on the pedestal that we had previously installed them upon. For Walt this realization comes almost too late and Bernard almost catches it, but he is so self-involved it passes him by.

William Baldwin and Anna Paquin are both wonderful in their small roles as the boys' tennis coach and Bernard's student/lover, respectively. William Baldwin's Ivan is calm, easy going, and blessedly simple, all the things that Bernard is not. Anna Paquin's Lily is a young writer who falls in love with the writer and not the man. Though the characters are there to help exemplify the ever-growing valley between the parents, Paquin and Baldwin do such a wonderful job, you want to know how each of them got to this point in time.

Though many people are calling attention to the performances of the sons, to me this film solidified Linney and Daniels more than anything else. Linney has been nominated twice for an Academy Award (for "You Can Count on Me" and "Kinsey") and every performance just brings her closer and closer to the hearts and minds of the discriminating movie-going public. Jeff Daniels, on the other hand, is still trying to be taken seriously as an actor. With roles "Dumb and Dumber" and "My Favorite Martian" it can be easy to forget that Daniels is an accomplished actor who won Mia Farrow's heart in "The Purple Rose of Cairo" and assumed the needed gravitas in "Gettysburg". This year Daniels had a small but well acted role in George Clooney's "Good Night and Good Luck", but it is with "The Squid and the Whale" where he truly shines.

In a year when films seem to require a gimmick or special effects to be noticed, it is good to see that this movie is slowly, but hopefully surely, gaining a well-deserved audience.