DVD

The Squid and the Whale

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Cast: Jeff Daniels (Bernard), Laura Linney (Joan), Jesse Eisenberg (Walt), Owen Kline (Frank)
Written and directed by: Noah Baumbach
Release date: September 2005

“Mom and me versus you and dad”…the movie opens with these words onto a not-so friendly family tennis match. It’s Brooklyn 1986 and the battle-lines are drawn. At stake is the fate of the Berkman family. After watching Margot at the wedding recently, I revisited and savored The squid and the whale. A semi-autobiographical account based on Noah Baumbach’s childhood experiences, this perfect bittersweet concoction was his break-out movie. It takes a long hard look at a couple on the verge of a divorce. It dissects them to lay bare the tragi-comic dynamics of their disintegrating relationship. And with an uncanny insight it depicts the impact on the kids.

Bernard and Joan Berkman have been married for seventeen years. Both are authors. It is a family where Dickens and Kafka are regular topics of conversation at the dinner table. However, Bernard is past his prime,having published his last book quite some time back. Joan is a rising star on the literary firmament. Bernard is unable to let go of his glory days. He never failed. It was the world which failed him. And Joan in efforts to assert herself, takes to having affairs. Ultimately the flash point is reached and they separate.

Walt the teenaged older son worships Bernard. Very consciously he tries to model his personality after him. To the extent that he borrows and parrots his father’s opinions on classics, without ever having read them. He molds not only his likes and dislikes but even his loves and hates on the sage advice of Bernard. In contrast to Walt’s pathetic intellectual pretensions, Frank, the younger son, is a self-confessed philistine. Though he hardly knows what it means. He is at an age when a child’s world still revolves around his mother. He is firmly on Joan’s side and refuses to acknowledge Bernard’s new apartment as home. Soon, he takes to some rather unsavory habits to cope up.

In such scenarios, perfectly reasonable people lose all sense of propriety and are prepared to go to any length to get back at their partners or to humiliate them. Joan sneaks into Bernard’s room at night to retrieve the books she had bought. Bernard steals them back from her. And tells his sons that their mother wrote her maiden name on them to mislead him.

The minutiae of the painful process, are presented with a sense of cruel irony and prickly sarcasm. Sample this for gallows humor. At the family meeting, Bernard and Joan inform the kids about the detailed schedule for the joint custody. Frank asks what about the cat. Oh shit! They forgot to discuss the cat!

While Laura Linney gets into the skin of an well-etched character, Jeff Daniels’ understated performance effortlessly brings out the intricacies of the male ego. But it is the kids who threaten to steal the show. They are both natural actors and play their roles with heartbreaking candor.

Noah Baumbach treats his imperfect characters with an even-handed compassion. But he doesn’t spare their mistakes either. At less than ninety minutes, it feels like an exceptionally well-written short-story. In his next movie Margot at the wedding he somewhat lost his balance . I just hope that Noah Baumbach is able to regain the raw intimacy and immediacy of this movie in his future works.