When Bernard and Joan settle on a divorce and joint custody, the impulse to take sides magnifies. The pairings are shuffled in a subsequent dinner scene that’s every bit as charged with antagonism, with the parents gathered on one side of the table as they surveil their children’s eating habits. A cutthroat doubles match at an indoor tennis facility opens The Squid and the Whale and brusquely sets the stakes: Joan Berkman (Laura Linney) and her youngest son, Frank (Owen Kline), face off against her eldest son, Walt (Jesse Eisenberg), and her husband, Bernard (Jeff Daniels).
#The squid and the whale crack#
Where a melodramatic family drama might establish an image of unity only to gradually crack away at it, Baumbach eschews any such illusions right off the bat. Neither purely observational nor governed by any consistent subjectivity, The Squid and the Whale is a film that, despite its constrained scale, takes a panoramic view of family dynamics, allowing each character a spotlight to be off-putting while simultaneously partaking in their fleeting impressions and sensations. Holed up in the sunless sectors of Park Slope for far too long, The Squid and the Whale’s central Brooklynite family-by all accounts a surrogate for Baumbach’s own-is built on frictions: between a husband’s delusions of intellectual superiority and a mother’s more open and accepting demeanor between a son’s unapologetic embrace of sports and a father’s dismissal of this passion as unserious between another son’s feigned maturity and a mother’s struggle to delicately expose him as inexperienced and, most of all, between each character and their own conscience.
(It’s telling that his latest three efforts, the breeziness of which suggest a filmmaker reading his reviews and calibrating his tone accordingly, don’t hit as hard.) The cumulative impact validates Baumbach’s alleged cruelty as a natural, unshakeable route to emotional truth, not a temperament crudely applied to individual scripts. Equally hard-hearted and uncompromising in its mode of delivery as its coolly received follow-ups, Margot at the Wedding and Greenberg, the film executes its mercilessness in dart throws, with each offhand aggression piercing the cork around the bull’s-eye until the board is nearly filled up and a moment of release is granted.
#The squid and the whale full#
The conventional wisdom around Noah Baumbach as a cranky misanthrope with a preemptive grudge against his fictional players-one of the hoariest ad-hominem characterizations in circulation-wasn’t yet in full swing when The Squid and the Whale bruised audiences with its lucidity and rawness.
0 kommentar(er)
