I’ve avidly followed Noah Baumbach’s career since his perceptive comedy/drama Kicking and Screaming (a fine flick worthy of its own review in time, and just recently released by Criterion), onto his sophomore slump-breaking Mr. Jealousy (which definitely has its moments and succeeds in story far better than Kicking and Screaming), and then to his co-writing credit with Wes Anderson for The Life Aquatic (which was quite surprisingly one of the most uninspired scripts I’ve seen). But it wasn’t until The Squid and the Whale that Baumbach matured into a writer/director to take immense notice of.

From what I understand, this is essentially Baumbach’s personal story set in a somewhat fictionalized format. The story is simple and easy to follow:

An aging writer who has seen better days loses his wife, a writer showing potential, and they struggle to maintain a normal life for the children.

Stories like this have been told as long as divorce and separations became socially prominent. But this story is different because it is resplendent with characters of depth who face pain and loss and often implode under the strain. Jeff Daniels was nominated for a Golden Globe for his role as the family patriarch, Bernard, and deserved it. He gives a nuanced performance that casts him as a hero, a villain, a scoundrel, and a pity-case over the course of the film. Bernard is obtusely intellectual, battering lesser minds with his emphatic opinions (he never makes a judgment, he catalogs and reports his opinion as fact). Bernard is, inwardly, bitter over the stalled momentum of his literary career and channels his overbearing intellect as a professor at a New York college.

Bernard's counterpoint, Joan (Laura Linney), is the most unexamined character of the film but provides an acceptable foil for the rest of the cast. She has had affairs, she no longer loves Bernard (probably because of his sour attitude), and seems to be a woman coming to terms with the fact that the man she married was a projection more than a reality.

Teenager Walt (Jesse Eisenberg), is a pompous jerk for the most part, almost entirely because he reveres his father. While he blindly repeats Bernard’s opinions on books he hasn’t read, he also plagiarizes a Pink Floyd song at a talent show and spends much of his time either ruminating over the changes this separation entails or pursuing losing his virginity. He is not a typical teenager, but then he hasn’t had a typical upbringing.

The youngest son, Frank (Owen Kline), handles the divorce by drinking alcohol in secret and masturbating in public. He is drawn more to his tennis instructor, Ivan (William Baldwin), though his father immediately discounts Ivan as a philistine.

This is a movie about small triumphs and cruel losses. It is spellbinding to watch the family struggle to make something out of a declination. It is honest to the point you can’t turn away. In the end, the family is imploding over its own tragedy, often highlighted by Bernard’s attempts to rationalize away the bad or to manipulate the children with a few choice words.

Baumbach’s directorial hand is sure and accomplished, bearing a close resemblance to the dramas of Woody Allen. And, like Allen, Baumbach has used New York as a character that shapes much of the emotion of the piece. It is shot with lingering grays and subtle blue shades, and the camera roves freely over the scenes. The performances are uniformly rewarding but it is the writing that is the star. How Baumbach can sell out his inner pain by writing such a personal film is a thing of wonder. He casts no character as a saint and rarely even comes close to making any of them likeable. But they are also, paradoxically, endearing because we feel what they feel. The title comes from a memory of family unity that Walt often wanders back to. What this film is saying, in the end, is that there is no going back once decisions have been made. The family was destined to crack when the first crack appeared, probably years before we got to the start of this film.

Baumbach has crafted a touching, sometimes funny, but always honest and painful film. It brings to mind the work of Sofia Coppola, particularly Lost in Translation, but will (hopefully) touch an audience that couldn’t sit through the ennui of that film. In other words, there is a plot here. Character-driven, yes, but an actual plot rather than a series of vignettes highlighting a theme. I’m sure that when filming was completed and the work was edited and the movie locked, Baumbach must have had a private moment where he looked at himself and realized he had done one of the noble goals of any artist: Make an affective work that clears up his own past and present by squaring it away once and for all. This is a work that will be appreciated by a select few, but for those few the reward will be worth the pain of this film’s genesis. And Baumbach can breathe a sigh of relief and know that he is one step closer to putting an end to a painful past.

Recommended: Yes

Movie Mood: Serious Movie
Viewing Method: Other
Film Completeness: Looked complete to me.
Worst Part of this Film: Nothing