The Squid and the Whale

Here's the deal. I really wanted to like The Squid and the Whale. I adore Laura Linney and Anna Paquin. Writer and director Noah Baumbach co-wrote The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou with Wes Anderson. The subject matter seemed good, the characters unique. I was excited.

Woe the disappointment.

The film is a "semi-autobiographical" account of the divorce of Bernard (Jeff Daniels) and Joan (Laura Linney), two writers and scholars. Joan's career is on the rise, while the arrogant and childish Bernard's career seems to be dimming. The divorce places a strain on the couple's two sons, Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) and Frank (Owen Kline). Taking sides in the matter, Walt (about 16 years old) chooses his father, emulating Bernard's arrogant, anti-philistine attitude and blaming his mother for the entire ordeal, which lands him in trouble when he realizes he is just as emotionally stunted as his father and he has thrown away a promising romantic relationship because of it. Frank (maybe around 11) clings to his mother, rejecting his father's attitude through open defiance. Though vulnerable and emotional around his family, Frank lashes out through alcohol consumption and sexual deviance.

This is a stunning premise. Unfortunately, after establishing the latent hostility present in the marriage before the separation (using, I might add, some clever devices and brilliant performances by Linney and especially Daniels), the film quickly degenerates into what seems like a forum for Baumbach to work out the issues he has regarding his own parents' divorce. Becoming oppressively autobiographical, it ends up watching more like an angsty teenager's diary: lack of subtlety, poor narrative development, and one-dimensional characters who are not the slightest bit likable (excepting Joan, the mother, whose character was so poorly developed that understanding her is like psychoanalyzing a Dick and Jane book.)

The movie smacks of Wes Anderson's influence, especially in the intellectual, dysfunctional family and the characters of the tennis instructor Ivan (a bland William Baldwin) and Bernard himself, his clueless pomposity tasting vaguely like Bill Murray's Steve Zissou. This type of comparison would have been pleasurable had Baumbach created a movie on par with Anderson. But he didn't.

It's not that this movie was bad. It was just disappointing. Baumbach was onto something great, and it would have been had he not been so stuck in his own experience. As it stands, The Squid and the Whale feels like a Lifetime Original Movie with the eccentric replacing the melodramatic. It would have made a pretty good short story or memoir. Instead, it made yet another movie that everyone but me seemed to like.