It did: The Squid And The Whale is lean and mean—its runtime is a tight, glorious 81 minutes, and emotional scenes that could have played out longer cut quickly to the next ones so as not to lose momentum. It’s also very intimate, both in its storytelling scope and its aesthetic, with a filmmaking style that had a “raw feel,” as Baumbach put it to The A.V. Club‘s Noel Murray, that was inspired by “French New Wave movies, and John Cassavetes and early Martin Scorsese.” And the film’s verisimilitude—the quick shots of a bodega counter or a subway stop in Flatbush, say, or the very Park Slope-y bathroom radiator and tiling, or the constant search for a parking spot—heightens the sense of place and help you immediately understand it, even if you’ve never set foot in Brooklyn. “The brownstone we used belonged to my childhood friend Ben and his wife Molly,” Baumbach told IndieWire. “They were really generous to let us transform their place and relocate while we filmed. Shooting in places that had real meaning to me helped me connect with the material on both a visceral and creative level. I also used my parents’ real books. And I put Jeff [Daniels] in my dad’s clothes.”
Daniels, who is fantastic in The Squid And The Whale, plays Bernard Berkman, a snobby and formerly notable author (though he’s loathe to admit the “formerly” part) who is very much in the mold of Baumbach’s go-to fascinations: past-their-prime or self-described, underappreciated-genius characters. Bernard and his wife, Joan —played by Laura Linney, who gives arguably the best performance in the film, flitting between a sweet motherly voice to calling her kid “a shit” to breaking into laughter because her character, whose writing career is on the upswing while Bernard’s is stalled, is too exhausted to argue—have decided to separate.
Their two children, 16-year-old Walt and 12-year-old Frank (Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline, respectively, with the former tackling, presumably, a young Baumbach surrogate), handle the news differently. Walt immediately takes his father’s side and villainizes his mother, while the more emotionally open Frank tells all of his friends about the split right away and resorts to drinking alcohol alone and masturbating in school, spreading his cum on lockers and library books. This is very much the kids’ film: Early on, the parental strife is seen from their perspective—at a distance, with Walt crouching near the banister to hear the muffled shouting of his parents below.
If some of the Frank stuff sounds particularly left-field or even envelope-pushing for a comedic drama that is, ultimately, an empathetic portrait of a divorce and the people it hurts, it is—and it’s not the only instance. These parents talk remarkably candidly, too candidly, about sex with their children, and Bernard in particular gives some very questionable advice. He and Walt even get into an odd sort of love triangle with one of Bernard’s writing students, the lively, 20-year-old Lili (a great Anna Paquin) that calls to mind the one at the center of Squid producer Wes Anderson’s Rushmore. Before Lili moves in with them—and sleeps with her professor and flirts with his son—Bernard describes her work like this: “She’s a very risky writer, Lili. Very racy. I mean, exhibiting her cunt in that fashion is very racy. I mean, Lili hails her influences in postmodern literature, a bit derivative of Kafka. For a student, very racy. Did you get that it was her cunt?” (The fact that you end up caring for Bernard in the end is one of Squid‘s greatest achievements.)
The Squid And The Whale arrived at a weird and (from an outsider’s perspective) make-or-break time for Baumbach, whose career had stumbled in the late ’90s. A Filmmaker piece from 2007, when the director was promoting his follow-up to Squid, Margot At The Wedding, tidily summed up that stretch: “After his second film, Mr. Jealousy (1997), Baumbach admits that he got “derailed” and ended up making Highball (1997) pseudonymously then scripted a TV movie, Thirty (2000), neither of which he considers to be his best work. However, his career was re-energized by his association with Wes Anderson: He brought Baumbach on board to co-write The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (2004), and then produced Baumbach’s triumphant The Squid And The Whale (2005).” Murray assessed his pre-Zissou period even more bluntly: “Baumbach fell off the radar.”
It’s hard to imagine the Noah Baumbach we know now—the co-scribe of a billion-dollar phenom, who will release a film starring George Clooney, Adam Sandler, and Laura Dern this November as one of the rare writer-directors who can seemingly make whatever he wants these days—without The Squid And The Whale putting him back on that radar. And while it’s foolish to opine on conversations and dealings you weren’t privy to, it’s also tough not to think that his professional collaboration with Anderson helped bring Squid to life. To this day, Squid is the only film that Anderson has produced that he hasn’t also directed and co-written.
But beyond the machinations of finally getting a passion project off the ground, Squid is a notable step up from what Baumbach had done before. Watching it feels akin to seeing a band you like come out with a third record that really surprises you, absolutely rules, and crystallizes the bits you appreciated about them in the first place. Kicking And Screaming is a lot of fun, extremely quotable, and has an amusing, understandable premise. Who doesn’t just want to stay at college and ignore the real world for another year after graduating? Mr. Jealousy is also enjoyable as a Woody Allenish, talky comedy starring Kicking vet Eric Stoltz and The Sopranos‘ Annabella Sciorra. But The Squid And The Whale, even though it has a lot of the same ingredients—snobbery, film and book references, smart characters, heartache, a lot of chatting about New York—is a revelation in comparison. It’s assured, complete, raw, and instantly worthy of attention, as if Baumbach had this kind of movie in the back of his brain and was finally able to extract it. (“I do think that I in some ways trusted my own voice as a filmmaker more on this one,” he said in that A.V. Club interview.)
One of the running jokes of The Squid And The Whale is that Walt pretends that he penned Pink Floyd’s “Hey You.” He ends up winning the talent show for his performance (“I’m going to play lead guitar and do vocals on a song…I wrote,” he says), only to have his trophy taken away when it’s discovered that it was actually an incredibly popular track by Pink fucking Floyd. Ken Leung’s school therapist presses him on why he lied. “I felt I could have written it, so the fact that it was already written was kind of a technicality,” Walt replies, quickly and defensively. In Squid, you get little glimpses of a smart, impressive teen (though not as smart and impressive as he let on) who would make a film, 19 years later as an adult, that’d finally win those trophies, give him the shot of confidence he needed to reenergize his career, and—most importantly—happen to be really goddamn good (or, to mangle a quote from Bernard, “the fillet of the genre”).
