The Squid and the Whale Release Date: October 7, 2005 Starring: Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney, Jesse Eisenberg, Owen Kline Directed by: Noah Baumbach
PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 10/6/05)
It’s a rare film that can be convincingly tender, bitterly funny, and ruthlessly cutting over the course of fewer than 90 minutes. The Squid and the Whale not only manages this, it also contains moments that sock you with all three qualities at the same time. Writer-director Noah Baumbach has crafted this tale out of real love and, I presume, painful ambivalence, revisiting the divorce of his own parents (the literary critic–novelist Jonathan Baumbach and the film critic Georgia Brown) for this story of two literary types (beautifully played by Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney) whose marriage is inflected with and infected by the idealism and intellectual currents of the ’60s; they enact mini-dramas of resentment and recrimination before the unwilling audience of their two sons, a teen and a preteen, both of whom are going through some nasty struggles of their own. Baumbach tells the story with great fluidity and none of the hip coyness that marked previous efforts such as Kicking & Screaming (no, not the soccer movie) and Mr. Jealousy. It’s a breakthrough work and one of the year’s most powerful pictures.—Glenn Kenny
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