Review of The Squid and the Whale (2005) by Chris R — 12 Nov 2009

The beginning really had me going. It starts with a family playing tennis and arguing, and you get the feeling the movie will be covered in real time like a sports match. The father is a reasonably successful writer who is extremely opinionated about people. His older son adores him and treats his word like stone, so that it would be impossible to read A Tale of Two Cities, for example, or in any event not worthwhile, because he already knows "it's not serious Dickens." The mother has a hard time not sleeping around. The younger son wants to be a tennis pro like one of the men his mother is snogging.

So far I like this movie. It has an inspiring pace and at the time I felt cut adrift of my expectations, which is a feeling I love. The dysfunctional family is an endlessly generative set, because even though families that don't work right (as opposed to smashing to villainous shards) tend to share some features, they are all warped on their own: they glide about on their own slipping turf. People say everyone's family is dysfunctional until they meet one, and then they prefer to say other things like "I would kill myself"; I consider myself knowledgeable, a little, and can attest to the sheer number of people who repeat those words after some boot camp.

The trouble--if there is any trouble, which is what I felt--is that the characters become more and more petty. At first they are amusing and then they are smaller and smaller inklings. Flaubert once said that it is the foremost job of a writer to have sympathy with his characters, otherwise (I paraphrase) no one will. If this is a movie about pettiness and narrow-mindedness, the pettiness and narrow-mindedness of parents who put their squabbles ahead of their children, then it succeeds on that count. But the characters seem to fall from the occasion rather than rise to it (whatever that means--I'll get to that in two seconds).

Wes Anderson produced this movie, and it shows in the second half or last third. In Wes Anderson's movies, dysfunctional families are made of people who are larger than life. The comedy is a heartfelt one that brings some kind of light into the world. In the latter part of The Squid and the Whale, the movie feels like a Wes Anderson movie that has lost its comedy and also the uniqueness of the first moments that I liked so much, the new voice. It feels like The Ice Storm without the dramatic machismo--pointless, which I can accept, but also encroachingly feeble and derivative.