Baumbach renders ordinary seafood into an exquisite taste of life.
When you and I and those we love lie peacefully mouldering in our earthy beds, consigned to eternal slumber by the flu pandemic or prions or whichever testy identity group manages to get its hands on the most raw plutonium first; when we have all shuffled off to our posthumous rewards, and alien intelligence at last discovers and marvels
***image2***
over humanity's small achievements; when they gingerly disinter our civilization's videocassettes with their long, thin fingers, gazing at them with bulbous, phosphorescent eyes; when they get to the layer that holds the detritus of 2005, may they please, please not unearth
Deuce Bigalow
, or
The Brothers Grimm
, or any of a dozen other stinkers which did bajillions of dollars of box office this year. May they instead first come across writer Noah Baumbach's directorial debut,
The Squid and the Whale
.
Drenched in a subtly literary perfume,
Squid
invites ready comparison to the work of certain New York novelists: Philip Roth, Saul Bellow (whose paperbacks turn up repeatedly during the movie) and even JD Salinger-though its most obvious antecedent is Wes Anderson's 2001 "middle child" movie,
The Royal Tenenbaums
. Certainly it exhibits the same '80s period-piece nostalgia, faintly depressed in a Reagan-era sort of fashion, with correspondingly washed-out exteriors of Brooklyn brownstones.
From the film's opening-a combative tennis match in which Bernard Berkman (a scruffily bearded Jeff Daniels) and his older son Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) play doubles against wife and mother Joan (Laura Linney) and younger son Frank (Kevin Kline's progeny Owen)-the stage is promptly set for ferocious family conflict, thanks to outstanding ensemble work right off the bat. Bernard, one perceives immediately, is the worst kind of academic and pseudo-intellectual, with a musty whiff of the démodé about him-yet Daniels manages to gain our compassion for Bernard by revealing the insecurities which underlie his sententiousness. He has ample reason to be insecure; once a fairly successful writer, he now can't publish his latest manuscript, while Joan, who's recently begun writing fiction herself, places a short story with the New Yorker and her first novel with Knopf. Can This Marriage Be Saved? Not bloody likely when
***image1***
you add Bernard's entitlement complex ("I cooked dinners!" he protests, to which Joan replies scathingly "You mean that time you made hamburgers when I had pneumonia?") to his attempts to seduce his "edgy" female student (Anna Paquin as Lili, who writes from the POV of her vagina), and Joan's own carnal interest in the tennis instructor (William Baldwin)-who is, Bernard says with contempt, a Philistine.
All this might be poignant but nothing extraordinary, were it not for the performances of Eisenberg and Kline. As the boys side with either father or mother, respectively, they recreate their parents' dysfunctionality (Walt adopting his father's noxious mannerisms-e.g., dishonesty, and nervously referring to
The Metamorphosis
, which he hasn't read, as "Kafkaesque"- while Frank develops precocious tastes for both beer and autoeroticism) in a pair of painfully accurate performances. And both camera and actors manage to capture all this with a minimum of fuss, so that by the time he deploys the film's most dramatic shots, referencing Godard and upping the emotional ante at the last minute, Baumbach has more than earned the right to do so.
