The Squid and the Whale

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 1980's.

AMG Plot: Two boys learn the hard way about how a marriage falls apart in this independent comedy drama. Bernard (Jeff Daniels) is a novelist whose career has gone into a slow decline as he spends more time teaching and less time writing. His wife, Joan (Laura Linney), meanwhile, has recently begun publishing her own work to widespread acclaim, which only increases the growing tension between them. One day, Bernard and Joan's two sons — 16-year-old Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) and 12-year-old Frank (Owen Kline) — are told that their parents are separating, with Bernard renting a house on the other side of their Park Slope, Brooklyn, neighborhood. As the parents set up a schedule for spending time with their children, Walt and Jesse can hardly imagine that things could get more combative between their folks, but they do, as Joan begins dating Ivan (William Baldwin), Frank's tennis instructor, and Bernard starts sharing the house with Lili (Anna Paquin), one of his students. Meanwhile, the two boys begin taking sides in the battle between their parents, with Walt taking after his father and Frank siding with his mom. Based on writer/director Noah Baumbach's own childhood experiences with his parents' divorce, The Squid and the Whale won prizes for writing and direction at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. — Mark Deming

AMG Review: Writer/director Noah Baumbach takes a major step forward as a filmmaker with The Squid and the Whale. Perhaps it's the combination of revelatory autobiographical content and producer Wes Anderson's formal influence, but this is Baumbach's most emotionally potent and visually coherent film to date. While Baumbach's primary focus remains on his characters — their personality quirks including what might be called "comfort phrases," (Ivan's use of "my brother" as punctuation, Joan [Laura Linney] calling her children "Pickle" and "Chicken," and Bernard's [Jeff Daniels] use of "filet," as in "Leonard is the filet of the crime genre," are good examples) — his visuals, including a trip across Prospect Park by subway (while the family takes the car) work strongly in support of his narrative. Baumbach's ubiquitous references to other films, distractingly prominent in his earlier work, are integrated seamlessly into The Squid and the Whale. While his other films certainly had their tender, sincere moments, Baumbach occasionally seemed to strain to get laughs, or to ingratiate the audience to his oddball characters. He moves beyond that here. His blunt rendering of Frank's (the amazing young Owen Kline) disturbed sexual reaction to his parents' split, and Walt's (Jesse Eisenberg as a stand-in for the young Baumbach) pretentious adoption of his father's air of intellectualism feel painfully true-to-life, beyond their entertainment value. As piercing and witty as Baumbach's script is, it couldn't work without a superb cast. These are deeply flawed people struggling through a crisis, unable to see beyond their own narrow view. Baumbach captures the pain and confusion that lurk beneath their anger and bluster. The Squid and the Whale is marked by a sometimes painful emotional honesty that lends even the goofiest characters (e.g. Ivan) their dignity and humanity. — Josh Ralske