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Rupture of the deep
Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale
BY PETER KEOUGH
Related Links

The Squid and the Whale's official Web site

Peter Keough reviews Noah Baumbach's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

Noah Baumbach’s squid pro quo

Perhaps the key to understanding the work of Noah Baumbach, director of Kicking and Screaming, Mr. Jealousy, and now the autobiographical The Squid and the Whale, isn’t that, like the hero of his new film, he’s the son of divorced former film critics but rather that, though born and raised in Brooklyn and currently a Manhattan resident, he’s — well, let’s let him explain.

"I’m a huge Red Sox fan. You can trace it like some kind of lineage. My dad was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan. He grew up in Brooklyn, and then when they moved, he became a Mets fan. But he hated the Yankees, so I grew up hating the Yankees, and, when I was very young, liking the Mets. But the Mets were very bad back then. I wanted my own team, that was a way to distinguish myself, but I never was going to pick the Yankees, so I picked the Red Sox as the kind of Mets substitute. And the Red Sox, until last year, were much more heartache than the Mets were. Rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for Microsoft or something."

Perhaps these mixed loyalties contributed to his setting The Squid in 1986, the year the Mets beat the Red Sox in the World Series, though that event is never mentioned in the film. Instead the inspiration comes from a life-sized diorama in the Natural History Museum of the title undersea monsters in mortal combat. For Baumbach, the exhibit was so dreadful that he covered his eyes, yet he kept returning to it, accompanied by his mother. What was so terrifying and so irresistible?

"The whole thing of it, the geography of that room. You’ve got this giant whale [hanging] from the ceiling and these amazing dioramas all around it. But in the corner on the left, it really just looks black, maybe it’s not even a working exhibit, but the closer you get, the more it comes into focus and there’s this . . . there’s these bits of things, tentacles, eyes, teeth, and there’s something very frightening about it. But at the same time I was always drawn to that corner. It was always this terror and fun, participating with it, adding to it, and at certain times of my childhood I imagined there could be more than one squid. I would cover my eyes, and my mother would later retell the details to me."

In a way, it sounds like a fan’s approach to the typical Red Sox season. But Baumbach’s film is concerned with even more primal passions, and his concept altered when he saw Louis Malle’s Le souffle au cœur|Murmur of the Heart. It persuaded him not to shoot the film as told by a 30-year-old pondering his youth but from the point of view of the teenage hero.

So, does he think his film is as Oedipal as Malle’s?

"Well no one sleeps with their mom. I don’t know if you can get more Oedipal than that."

How about watching a film you made about your mother and father with your mother and father, who happen to be film critics?

"It took me until my third film to shake the analytical approach and come at filmmaking from a much more emotional standpoint. But they really loved the movie. They’re writers too, and they’ve written fiction about their parents. It’s not unfamiliar territory."

To return to more-familiar territory: Sox’ chances next year?

" It depends on the pitching . . . "

_PK

 

Some things you don’t expect movies to do very well, given the two-dimensional nature of the medium. Subjectivity. Tone. Point of view. Stories about teenagers that aren’t exploitative. In his fourth film, Noah Baumbach does it all.

Maybe his having lived the story makes a difference. The son of two writers who got divorced, he’s made a film about a teenager whose parents are two writers who get divorced. It’s set in Park Slope, Brooklyn, in 1986, just like his own experience. Jeff Daniels, who plays the father, Bernard Berkman, wears the same clothes Baumbach’s father did during that period. It seems to work, because Daniels’s performance feels as lived in as his blazers; he’s never been better. So The Squid and the Whale has that whiff of authenticity.

The dangers of such material are self-indulgence and offputting irony. Those are also the qualities of a teenager like Walt (Jesse Eisenberg), from whose point of view Baumbach tells the story, both empathizing with Walt’s innocence and coldly observing its corruption. No average boy, Walt comes from an intellectual background where family conflicts are rationalized, analyzed, sublimated, and ignored until they explode.

That’s the situation in which Walt finds himself at the beginning of the film. The family is engaged in a doubles match, mom Joan (Laura Linney) and younger brother Frank (Owen Kline) versus Bernard and Walt. Watching over it all is Ivan (William Baldwin), their charming but vaguely unwholesome tennis pro. Walt, who parrots his father’s axioms about literature and the state of modern culture, listens gravely as Bernard advises him on his mother’s "weak backhand." He watches approvingly as Bernard proceeds to pummel his wife with serves. She retreats in a huff, and the little scene provides the template for the bloodshed to come.

That includes a "family conference" in which the parents reveal their planned separation and the terms of "joint custody" by which the children will be shunted, separately, on assigned days, from the Park Slope house to one that Bernard has bought in the "filet" of another, less savory Brooklyn neighborhood. As this arrangement deteriorates, infidelities will take place and be disclosed, a writing student (Anna Paquin) will offer bemused comfort to Bernard and Walt, and Ivan, the "philistine," will hover in the background.

What did Tolstoy say about families? The difference between this and other films about broken homes lies in the details, the performances, the exquisite restraint, the sad, precise, hilarious dialogue. 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. Rather than impose meaning on experience, Baumbach allows it to form its own epiphanies, and they are as deep and freaky as the beasts of the title.


Issue Date: November 4 - 10, 2005
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