A Lula e a Baleia

Greetings again from the darkness. Writer/Director (and Wes Anderson collaborator) Noah Baumbach presents a semi-autobiographical therapy session where he unleashes the anguish and turmoil that has carried over from his childhood. The result is an amazing insight into what many people go through in a desperate attempt to try and make their family work.

The casting of Jeff Daniels forces us to view him as the grown up Flap from "Terms of Endearment". He has become a bitter, unfocused, pompous ass of a person, father, husband and professor. The inability to recapture the magic of his early writing success has caused him to look down on all other writers ... whether they be Fitzgerald or his own wife. This is Daniels' best work ever on screen and is at once, painful and a joy to behold.

Laura Linney plays his wife as a woman who loves her kids unequivocally and has a zest for life that her downbeat husband no longer shares. Her new found success as a writer sets her off on a trail of confidence and joy, all the while understanding that her family still needs her very much.

The kids really take the film to the next level. Jessie Eisenberg (brilliant in "Roger Dodger") and Owen Kline (son of Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates) are both scene stealers as they struggle in their own distinct ways with their separated parents and their continuance through adolescence. Watching Eisenberg's worship his dad and subsequently realize the truth is just amazing stuff. Kline's outbursts on the tennis court and at the ping pong table are nothing compared to his discovery of alcohol and self-pleasure. The angst and pain these two experience is felt by millions of kids in divorce situations.

Other outstanding performances include William Baldwin (the one from "Backdraft"), Holly Feifer (as Eisenberg's first girlfriend) and Anna Paquin (underused, but still very effective). Baldwin provides some comic relief with his incessant "my brother" narrative and Feifer is extraordinary in capturing teen adoration as she lusts after Eisenberg. Thanks to her distinct similarity in looks to Linney, I laughed outloud when Daniels tells Eisenberg "she's not my type".

Listening to Daniels try to manipulate everyone he communicates with causes immense dislike among viewers, but we can't help but feel some empathy for him as he seems to believe he is doing all he can do put his family back together. His fatherly advice is not to be missed (or followed!). Watching him look for the perfect parking place is really his search for his place in a world that has deserted him.

Baumbach has created a terrific film and probably exorcised some personal demons along the way. Definitely not a film for the whole family, but it offers much insight and many messages. Also the use of the soundtrack is downright brilliant including key music from Pink Floyd and Loudon Wainright.

Not being a child from a product of divorce, after seeing this movie I can appreciate the push and pull that manifests from divorce. Now, I am positive that not all broken homes are this broken, but Noah Baumbauch creates an environment that makes you squirm and want to cry all at the same time. All of the performances are near perfection and are executed with utmost conviction. I find that Jeff Daniels is one of those actors who get better with every movie he does. He is completely unlikeable in this movie yet you feel for him and you want him to get it together. Very few actors can play a prick and yet you are rooting for him and there are a few points in the film where you even buy into his bullshit as much as his oldest son (played by Jesse Eisenberg) does. The Squid and The Whale is not the most uplifting of fare, but it is a must view for anybody who appreciates film, not movies, film.

"The Squid and the Whale" is such a corrosive look at marriage and child rearing that it could inspire a backlash among parents to ban arts education, if not literacy altogether, from the schools in order to prevent their children from revenging upon them as much as writer/director Noah Baumbach does on his family, notwithstanding the usual closing disclaimer of fiction.

Almost as raw as the old PBS documentary series "An American Family," it is such a savage look at divorce that it could also be used to discourage people from getting married in the first place, let alone having kids or considering moving to a kibbutz where the kids would be raised communally. Evidently it was cathartic for Baumbach as he did get married when the film was completed (and his now spouse is thanked in the credits).

Produced by Wes Anderson, it seems like the nonfiction inspiration for "The Royal Tenenbaums," with urban, urbane siblings who aspire to be a writer and a tennis pro. The tennis, and ping pong, images repeat continuously throughout as the kids are bounced back and forth between the parents in a very negative portrayal of competitive joint custody, where even a parent moving close by is torture - "The other side of the park - is that even in Brooklyn?", vividly demonstrating how small a kid's world is.

Baumbach has clearly studied Woody Allen movies, also in smoothly incorporating very funny lines, and he uses Brooklyn, specifically the Park Slope neighborhood, like Allen uses Manhattan, street by street, subway stop by subway stop, though this surely will reinforce every prejudice the rest of the country has against raising kids in the city. I doubt out-of-towners will understand the karmic significances of looking for and finding a parking space. The final scenes in Manhattan seem an intentionally cathartic solution as in "Saturday Night Fever."

Jeff Daniels plays an even more obnoxious father as writer than Jeff Bridges in "The Door in the Floor" (ironically, as Daniels says he's frequently mistaken for Bridges by fans). He is frighteningly judgmental, hypercritical, selfish, competitive and all around emotional abuser, and out and out neglectful, though I'm not sure Oprah would do a show about this kind of abuse. He has absolutely no sense of appropriate boundaries between his pre-adolescent/adolescent sons and himself, and involves them in way too adult views that damage how they can be age appropriate. (Though it is a bit too arch to have his writing career be on the skids while his wife's begins to flourish.)

This is one of the few films about kids I've seen lately where the use of profanity is appropriately shocking as in this hyper articulate family it is emblematic of the family's break down in communication as the kids blithely parrot what they hear at home without understanding much of what they are talking about.

The younger generation handles scabrous lines of detailed dialog magnificently. Jesse Eisenberg had to endure similarly nasty lessons about male-female relationships in "Roger Dodger" and takes it a step further here. Owen Kline, Kevin's talented son, handles with aplomb scenes that reveal quite more about pre-adolescent boys than most females, even their mothers, may comfortably want to explicitly know goes on. The lacerating men and women of "Closer" at least didn't have kids and in "We Don't Live Here Anymore" (with another tempted college professor) the kids were fairly obliviously very young. This film very clearly illuminates how brutal deteriorating parental relationships are on older children, particularly in how they relate to the opposite sex. I assume we're supposed to feel positive at the end that the kids' cries for help are finally being heard, but I'm not sure the parents have grown or changed.

The other kids in smaller parts are also very natural. Laura Linney's beauty is downplayed for some reason. She doesn't usually get to be maternal in films and she shows that warmth in lovely ways here. I'm pretty sure William Baldwin's character is intended to be both bland and annoying. Anna Paquin doesn't get much to work with as the usual student temptress in the plot, though she brings a certain ditsy cheerfulness to the role.

The music is wonderful, including a score by Britta Phillips and Dean Wareham of Luna. A Loudon Wainwright song, who has written extensively of similar father/son issues, closes over the credits. Pink Floyd figures in the plot and it is a bit hard to believe that the parents of Park Slope in 1985 were not familiar with Roger Waters.

This is not a date movie -- unless you want to break up with the person afterwards or tell your spouse you want a divorce or tell your significant other you definitely never want to have kids.

A friend of mine was hesitant to see this movie, because she'd heard that it pushes the agenda that divorce is never a good option for dealing with marital problems. I don't really know who told her this, and I hope this same reason isn't keeping others from seeing it. This isn't at all what I took away from the film. It certainly communicates the idea that divorce isn't easy, on either the parents or the kids, but I don't feel that it pronounces judgement on those who turn to it as an option.

"The Squid and the Whale" is a sad--though at times very funny--look at what divorce does to one family in 1986 New York. Jeff Daniels plays the dad, a pompous, arrogant writer whose feelings of commercial failure (he teaches literature at a university) cause him to act intellectually superior to everyone he meets. Daniels is almost too good in this role; he reminded me way too much of people I actually know who are like this. He's the kind of guy who would be deadly at a dinner party, because there's no such thing as a casual or flippant remark in this guy's presence. He analyzes everything to death, and isn't content until everyone's opinion matches his own.

Laura Linney plays the wayward mom, blamed for the break up of the marriage by the dad because of a string of affairs she carries on. Her guilt keeps her from being able to discipline her sons, especially the oldest, who treats her horribly. Linney's role is smaller but in some ways much more complex than Daniels'. Her character has to take responsibility for her infidelity but still make the audience sympathize with her.

Caught in the middle of this mess are their two boys. The oldest quickly allies himself with his dad, and walks around regurgitating his father's opinions on every subject, rarely pausing to form any of his own. The younger son, more sensitive and tired of being intellectually brow beaten by his father and older brother, sticks closer to the mom. No one is totally to blame, yet no one is completely innocent either in this honest and frank film.

Noah Baumbach has made no secret of the fact that it is based on his own adolescent life, and it has that confessional feeling that movies in this genre frequently do. There are awkward moments when this doesn't totally work. The ending for one is rather ham-fisted, and a scene between the oldest son and his school therapist seemed awfully pat to me. But the acting and the sharp writing make up for these weaknesses, and the movie manages to be poignant without ever becoming maudlin or overly sentimental.

See it for the performances of Linney and especially Daniels, who has been proving his versatility as an actor over the last few years.

Grade: A-

This movie is a good film, that's for sure. The actors perform brilliantly and the script is original and touching. However, all this is boring.

I guess people with an interest in the social aspect of one's life will find this very nice and good. For the parents (and children) who are on the same path as the character, should they choose to really understand the movie, it will be a learning experience that will save them from a lot of pain and anguish.

OK, the guy is a cowardly hypocrite that hides behind his intellectual aura tons of frustration and, surely enough, stupidity. The woman leaves a life of discomfort and maybe even fear, but lacks the courage to do anything about it. She cheats on the husband then leaves clues to it, so that the responsibility of the divorce would fall on him. The sons pick sides based on age, both mimicking behaviour that they don't understand yet, and thus making fools of themselves. Very weird and socially tense situations, but that's it. After the first half an hour you know everything there is to know, only the awkward situations remain, in a hostile, not humorous manner.

The ending is as devoid of resolution as the entire content. The problems are there, you know what, where, when and how, but there is no solution. In the end, the film is nothing but a portrait, you either like it or you don't.