The Squid and the Whale (2005)
Directed by Noah Baumbach
Based on the true childhood experiences of Noah Baumbach and his brother, The Squid and the Whale tells the touching story of two young boys dealing with their parents' divorce in Brooklyn in the 1980s.
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21 films that influenced The Squid and the Whale
What critics say influenced The Squid and the Whale
What do a tennis match, writing desks for “lefties,” A Tale of Two Cities, and Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore have in common?
(Its sparse decor includes a poster for director Jean Eustache's epic of sexual angst, "The Mother and the Whore.")
Jean-Luc aside, Baumbach's model here is arguably Maurice Pialat and, less arguably, Jean Eustache, whose seminal bleeding wound, The Mother and the Whore, gets a cinephilic shout-out -- harrowing domestic dissection, emotional rawness, the artist's exorcizing-feeding upon his own upheavals.
At times, Baumbach's film slips into self-appreciating shorthand, as when the camera notes the movie poster in Walt's bedroom, for The Mother and the Whore, or he runs off to find the diorama of eternal, gargantuan struggle in the Museum of Natural History that grants The Squid and the Whale its unsubtle title.
Shot in grainy 16mm and fluidly cut, The Squid and the Whale adheres to the purity of the best of the New Wave as embodied by The Mother and the Whore poster on Walt�s wall.
And only in his decision to adorn scenes' backgrounds with obvious signifying novels (Bernard reading Saul Bellow's The Victim) and movie posters (Walt's one-sheet for The Mother and the Whore) does Baumbach's general directorial tact and understatement falter, a somewhat surprising shortcoming considering his delicate employment of lyrical pop song accompaniment to underscore the tumultuous action.
"That was my Jude the Obscure," he says, gazing at the shelf when finally returning to his former house; loaded onto an ambulance after a row with Linney, he quotes Belmondo's misogynistic Breathless epitaph.
He speaks like a character in a Harold Pinter play -- "an ex-student of mine, now a friend, is feting me with a dinner" -- and never passes up an opportunity to drop names ("It's Mailer's favorite of my books," "There was a woman who approached me at a party at George Plimpton's") or to show off how erudite he is: Even when he's facing a life crisis Bernard finds time to reminisce about director Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless."
And yet Baumbach hits a few killer bull's-eyes: In a late scene, the confused Frank, left alone for a weekend after his dad forgets to pick him up, riffles through his mother's underwear drawer and lays out her bra and panties on the bed, a lovely, fleeting homage to Louis Malle's "Murmur of the Heart."
Jeff Daniels' bile-filled professor and has-been writer ranks as the coldest and least ingratiating in a distinguished line of semi-lovable bastards scripted by Noah Baumbach or his occasional collaborator Wes Andersonincluding Gene Hackman's irascible patriarch in The Royal Tenenbaums and Bill Murray's burnt-out oceanographer in The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.
Deftly fusing both comedy and tragedy, the film joins The Ice Storm, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (which Baumbach co-wrote with Wes Anderson) as one of the strongest recent features about the far-reaching consequences of adultery and divorce.
The tennis connection is just one of the many striking resemblances this bears to Wes Andersons The Royal Tenenbaums …
He occasionally stumbles, but he never falls.If this story of an intellectual New York family on the skids sometimes seems familiar, it’s because Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums is such an obvious touchstone.
Owing to Baumbach's having co-written Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and Anderson having co-produced The Squid and the Whale, there's been a tendency to want to lump Baumbach and his film together with Anderson despite that Squid more resembles The Royal Tenenbaums, if it resembles anything of Anderson's at all.
Squid & The Whale is funny, but it plays like a poor man’s copy of The Royal Tenenbaums.
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The aforementioned Pink Floyd song is "Hey You" and its use in the film is fantastic along with the use of Tangerine Dream's music from Risky Business...genius.
Although not without moments of wise-ass comedy (the youngest son's confused, increasingly pervy antics are underscored, hilariously, by snippets of Tangerine Dream's ultra-smooth Risky Business theme) there's an underlying witty melancholy that suggests a filmmaker fully locked into his groove.
Paul Mazursky, Bob Rafelson and Elaine May come to mind -- as does one scene in particular, with Elliott Gould's parents in Jules Feiffer's more cartoonishly stylized "Little Murders," unable to express a single personal thought or feeling unless it's been codified and freeze-dried in quotation marks by some famous author.
Along with Whit Stillman ( Metropolitan , The Last Days of Disco ), Baumbach mined his post-collegiate ennui, best exemplified by Kicking and Screaming but also apparent in 1998s underrated Mr. Jealousy , for barbed laughs and emasculated male pathos in a way that came to define the decade, or at least its independent film movement.
No tracking shots for Noah Baumbach, but the image in The Squid and the Whale remains indie-degraded -- even Blue Velvet, excerpted during a clip, looks grainy and faded.
Baumbach's dialogue is often both amusing and on-the-mark, and he isn't afraid to create scenes that make the audience uncomfortable, such as when Bernard badgers Walt into taking a date to the ultra-kinky "Blue Velvet," then tags along as a chaperone, or when Walt and Bernard compete for the attention of college student Lili (Anna Paquin), who is renting a room in their house.
When the family wants to relax with John Badham's silly "Short Circuit," Bernard hauls them to David Lynch's gut-burning "Blue Velvet."
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The underutilized Jeff Daniels hasn't fit a role this well since 1993's "Gettysburg."
Younger brother Frank begins acting out sexually, hitting the liquor cabinet and bonding with tennis pro Ivan (William Baldwin, "Sliver," in fine fettle with a quirky characterization here) who dad's declared a philistine and mom's begun an affair with.