After teaming up with Wes Anderson to co-write Anderson's last film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, filmmaker Noah Baumbach has been vaulted into the realm of indie movie darlings, and his latest writing and directing effort, The Squid and the Whale, shows more than a few signs of Anderson's influence.
Baumbach, whose past films include Kicking and Screaming (not the Will Ferrell soccer-dad movie) and Mr. Jealousy, has actually been an astute chronicler of the lives of self-absorbed intellectuals for some time. With Squid, Baumbach scales back the humor of his earlier work and adopts a more serious and self-consciously hip tone, which more often than not works for him, although at times he risks coming off as an Anderson pretender.
What Baumbach has over the often cloying Anderson is a more naturalistic, less mannered style, which renders his story much easier to swallow than Anderson's quirky, overwritten films. The semi-autobiographical film takes place in 1986 in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope, where moderately successful novelist Bernard Berkman (Daniels) and his wife Joan (Linney) are in the process of getting a divorce. Caught in the middle are their two children, teenage aspiring intellectual Walt (Eisenberg), modeled after the director himself, and his younger brother Frank (Kline). Walt idolizes his dad, parroting his opinions about books and movies and adopting a similar self-important attitude, while Frank is closer to his mother, preferring tennis over literature.
The children are caught between their warring parents, who remain superficially civil but engage in vicious passive-aggressive behavior to undermine each other. Bernard is especially arrogant and cruel, and his misogyny and intellectual superiority rub off on Walt. Baumbach portrays the emotional trauma of divorce, for both parents and children, with pinpoint accuracy, so much so that the film is often hard to watch.
The performances are uniformly excellent, capturing the raw emotions of people who feel their lives are spiraling out of control. Daniels even manages to make the loathsome Bernard sympathetic at times, showing him as a man who just wants things back the way they were. Linney, in the less showy role, gives a typically masterful performance, and both young actors navigate the sensitive material with aplomb. Baumbach veers close to Anderson-like tweenness on occasion (overly precious with cutsey conceits), but he mostly keeps the film right on course, delivering an unflinching portrait of a family in crisis.