Review of The Squid and the Whale (2005) by Paul Z — 06 Jan 2009

The deepest impact taken by me from The Squid and the Whale is from Jeff Daniels's performance. To play such a self-unaware, egocentric person, brilliantly developed by Noah Baumbach, and to play him without a slant of judgment in any part of his portrayal, one must be a very perceptive and thus very affecting actor. In fact, what the movie generally says is almost undermined by what that character individually prompts me to think about, which is the question: Just because you are self-unaware and pretentious, does that necessarily mean that you are a pseudointellectual rather than an intellectual?

This is actually sort of a branch of the film's overall view of the current state of society. The movie is about self-absorption, how the actions of most people can be stripped to the deepest motive which will inevitably be a self-serving motive. The film's premise is very apt for its statement: It's about a divorce between two struggling writers with two sons, one son siding with the father and one with the mother. Laura Linney plays the mother with a nervous emotional self-involvement and accents the tone of her pitiful, deeply flawed mother, and we sympathize with her greatly and care that her self-sufficient life choices are successful.

The most enlightening thing about this movie is its uncanny objective views of people so confused and wrapped up in themselves. Overall, the film is a wonderful new installment in the recent breed of independent films with that quaint, coffee shop music sampler look and feel, among them Wes Anderson's films, Little Miss Sunshine, Me and You and Everyone We Know, et cetera. It's perhaps the best.

It may be the most sexually frank film I have ever seen that isn't about languishing teens or twentysomething losers. In dialogue and in brief moments, we relate to the early sexual experiences of Walt, the oldest son, played by Jesse Eisenberg in a terrifically gawky, skillfully immature performance, and Frank, the younger son played by Kevin Kline's adorable kid Owen, whose personal discovery of masturbation meshes unsanitarily with his rebellious reaction to his parents' divorce.

The Squid and the Whale also boasts one of the best film soundtracks in recent memory, full of calm, simple folk music that scaffolds the movie's New York atmosphere, the humblest and most residential the city can get.

I love this film because it's ultimately about growth. Granted, some characters don't change at all and never will, at least for the better anyway. But the journey taken by Walt and Frank is a very real and unassuming one, one with which we can feel all the more familiar because of how many touches of life Baumbach sprinkles throughout. The allegory of the Squid and Whale exhibit is itself seemingly non-sequitary, but to Walt it's not.