The Squid and The Whale
Ten years since its release and three decades past its setting in the 80s, “The Squid and the Whale” still holds up very well and is very much worth a watch. A sour yellow tint creeps across the screen in each scene in color and in flavor. Each of the characters is riddled with frustration, but writer and director Noah Baumbach lends wit and humor to their pain. The editing is impeccable and each cut is timed just right: the viewer has no time to grow tired and the quick pace follows slow emotion very well.
It is Jesse Eisenberg’s breakout role, and he shines as a disappointed and desperately pseudo-intellectual adolescent. His parents, played by Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney, are divorcing, and he is worried about how the cat will be managed in joint custody. He is desperate to experience and understand things but, more importantly, to be correct.
His father (who he considers to be the ultimate authority on all subjects, from future professions to Fitzgerald’s writing) is unable to get any of his work published after some early-career success, and takes Eisenberg under his wing. Every time the son solicits his father for advice, he listens attentively and adopts his perspective without question. When his mother suggests he takes a moment to form his own opinion, he rejects her completely.
The relationship between the parents is in shambles. Communication is lackluster or nonexistent. And while the movie’s low budget calls for few characters—outside the family there is the tennis pro and the girlfriend—this strengthens the tense connections that pick the family apart.
The parents separate, the mother keeping the family house in Brooklyn. Eisenberg’s younger brother gets into trouble as the family members distance themselves from one another, retreating further and further into their own discomfort, all the while hoping for something from a mother, a son, a husband.
Though the topics and emotions are far from pleasurable, the tone stays jocular throughout. It is as though the father knows how pretentious he is and how gifted his wife is, and the little brother somehow sees how he will look at these memories once he is grown.
“The Squid and the Whale” is Baumbach’s first major critically and monetarily successful project. Since then, he has collaborated with Wes Anderson on the animated hit Fantastic Mr. Fox and has worked closely with actress, writer and director Greta Gerwig in feel-good, emotional projects like Frances Ha and Mistress America.
Everyone’s frailty is finally forced to be exposed at the end of “The Squid and the Whale.” It is not a perfectly happy ending and everything is left untied, but this is as it should be and this is how families are; the parents are divorced and the father has suffered an injury and Eisenberg stopped trying to follow his fallacious and offensive ideology so rigorously. It cuts out at a museum with a beautifully concise series of shots of Eisenberg’s face as he finally faces the squid and the whale. He is watchful and pensive and breathy.