Rating: 4 and a half
Usually when we're given the premise of a "crumbling family," we envision a once-strong structure falling apart in massive chunks, or collapsing in on itself like a building demolition. Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale is more like a series of tiny explosions. The Berkman family's self-destruction in this semi-autobiographical film is like a game of Jenga, where little pieces come out one at a time, but there's always potential for catastrophe.
The father (Jeff Daniels) is a sardonic, intellectual type: English professor, washed-up novelist, tennis enthusiast. He doesn't have the time or capacity to actively care for his family because he's too busy picking philistines out of a crowd and proclaiming A Tale of Two Cities "minor Dickens." The mother (Laura Linney) is unfaithful, and becomes the subject of her husband's envy when her first novel gets published. They divorce, but we can tell that they had been separated in their minds for a long time.
Bernard and Joan, as they coldly refer to one another, use words to spite each other as much as action. The way the broken couple treat each other is potent enough, but the real disaster is what seeps down into the children. The older son (Jesse Eisenberg) sucks up all of his father's arrogant wisdom like a sponge, growing to hate his mother and ruin his first romantic relationship. The younger son (Owen Kline) takes up drinking and swearing and other unpleasant habits, to the exhausted disapproval of his parents and his tennis instructor (William Baldwin?!). The family gives up on politeness, losing any sense of deceny they may have felt around each other before.
Watching this movie is sort of like a form of torture, in that it is a very emotionally harrowing experience. Take the opening scene, for example. A tennis match: Daniels and Eisenberg versus Linney and Kline. The purpose is clearly to establish the nature of the characters, reflect the state of the marriage, and even foreshadow the sides that the children will take after the divorce. We can tell all of that less than ten seconds into the scene. If we are already watching it with an analytical eye, the film hardly presents a challenge. It has little ability to surprise us. Any psychiatrist would surely say that the family members are "textbook cases" of one condition or another. But Baumbach isn't going for depth of character. What the film does instead is turn our analysis against us, poisoning us with our own intuition, psychologically sickening us, making us wish we didn't understand so much of what's happening. Baumbach doesn't just want to show us the characters' pain (perhaps the pain he went through when his parents divorced), he wants us to actually feel pain. He brings to the screen something that is bold and rare: constant intentional discomfort. Like Schindler's List, but closer to home. Baumbach creates a conflict beyond the ones just within the Berkman family, a conflict between the viewer and the film. We are nauseated by what we see, but we hang on, waiting with fatigued intensity for that moment when the characters realize that there is something to be learned. They've got to realize it, right?
