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Amazon.co.uk review
The Squid and the Whale follows the divorce of Joan (Laura Linney, You Can Count on Me) and Bernard Berkman (Jeff Daniels, The Purple Rose of Cairo) as it wreaks havoc on the emotional lives of their two sons, Walt (Jesse Eisenberg, Roger Dodger) and Frank (Owen Kline, The Anniversary Party). Though there's no plot in the usual sense, the movie progresses with growing emotional force from the separation into the bitter fighting between Joan and Bernard and the hapless, floundering behaviour of Walt and Frank, who act out through plagiarism, sexual acts and drinking.
Some viewers may find the ending too diffuse; others will appreciate that writer/director Noah Baumbach (Mr. Jealousy) doesn't wrap up the messiness of life in a false cinematic package. Either way, viewers will appreciate how the specificity of the personalities makes The Squid and the Whale so compelling, as Baumbach has drawn the characters with such detail, both engaging and off-putting, that they leap off the screen. Naturally, he's greatly helped by the cast: Linney, Eisenberg, Kline and especially Daniels bite into these often unsympathetic portraits and give fearlessly honest performances, interlocked in both painful and funny ways--rarely have family dynamics been captured so vividly. If there was an ensemble Oscar, this cast would deserve it. --Bret Fetzer
Synopsis
In his third feature, director Noah Baumbach scores a triumph with an autobiographical coming-of-age story about a teenager whose writer-parents are divorcing. The father (Jeff Daniels) and mother (Laura Linney) duke it out in half-civilized, half-savage fashion, while their two sons adapt in different ways, shifting allegiances between parents. The film is squirmy-funny and nakedly honest about the rationalizations and compensatory snobbisms of artistic failure as well as the conflicted desires of adolescents for sex and status. In detailing bohemian-bourgeois life in brownstone Brooklyn, Baumbach is spot on. Everyone proceeds from good intentions and acts rather badly, in spite or because of their manifest intelligence. Fulfilling the best traditions of the American independent film, this quirky, wisely written feature explores the gulf between sexes, generations, art and commerce, Brooklyn and Manhattan.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
56 of 58 people found the following review helpful
Format:DVD
The Squid and the Whale is Noah Baumbach's autobiographical film about his parents' divorce. Beyond that I know nothing of the source material or of Baumbach's life - not even which of the two boys in the film represents him - but you don't need to, of course. And the truth of everything in the film beams through it so clearly that you would be in no doubt, anyway, that it came from real life.
Jeff Daniels gives a quietly barnstorming performance as Bernard (pronounced Ber-NARD) Berkman, a lazily bearded New York writer whose literary career is on the skids. His wife Joan (Laura Linney), meanwhile, has been published in the New Yorker and is about to get some good news about her first novel... Berkman is presented to us in toto in the opening scene, playing tennis with the family, the hilariously bitter competitive dad figure as he takes his son to one side and whispers "Try to get your mother's backhand. It's her weak point."
When the divorce is announced, along with joint custody ("Joint custody blows" - for some reason this has been changed on the UK DVD cover to 'joint custody sucks'), elder son Walt takes dad's side, accusing his mother of breaking up the family. He dates Sophie, a charming but unworldly girl who is taken in by his faux-intellectualism (another inheritance from his father), describing her favourite book as 'minor Fitzgerald,' bluffing a discussion and calling Metamorphosis 'Kafkaesque,' and faking authorship of Pink Floyd songs. Younger son Frank, aged - what? - ten or eleven, takes to masturbating and smearing his semen in public places, and to alcohol.
If all this makes it seem utterly grim, that could not be further from the truth. The film is not (or not only) uplifting in a Richard Yates way, for its honesty in portraying misery. It is bitterly brilliant, painfully funny, and with an almost non-stop series of great lines and scenes, mostly involving the self-involved Berkman Sr. One reviewer on imdb.com, who knew Jonathan Baumbach, the basis for Bernard Berkman, says that Daniels "amazingly, underplays the actual father."
Bernard: Joan, let me ask you something. All that work I did at the end of our marriage, making dinners, cleaning up, being more attentive. It never was going to make a difference, was it? You were leaving no matter what...
Joan: You never made a dinner.
Bernard: I made burgers that time you had pneumonia.
And the film is beautifully paced, too, with so many scenes cut short where other films would have played through until they became tiring or over-obvious. As a result, there is not a single boring moment in the entire film, which in fact comes in at well under 90 minutes.
It's quietly moving too, particularly in the central scene where son Walt explains to the psychotherapist that the only happy memory he can recall was when he was six years old, and doesn't involve his father. It also explains the title of the film, which comes back in the neat coda.
A vital film, and essential viewing.
Jeff Daniels gives a quietly barnstorming performance as Bernard (pronounced Ber-NARD) Berkman, a lazily bearded New York writer whose literary career is on the skids. His wife Joan (Laura Linney), meanwhile, has been published in the New Yorker and is about to get some good news about her first novel... Berkman is presented to us in toto in the opening scene, playing tennis with the family, the hilariously bitter competitive dad figure as he takes his son to one side and whispers "Try to get your mother's backhand. It's her weak point."
When the divorce is announced, along with joint custody ("Joint custody blows" - for some reason this has been changed on the UK DVD cover to 'joint custody sucks'), elder son Walt takes dad's side, accusing his mother of breaking up the family. He dates Sophie, a charming but unworldly girl who is taken in by his faux-intellectualism (another inheritance from his father), describing her favourite book as 'minor Fitzgerald,' bluffing a discussion and calling Metamorphosis 'Kafkaesque,' and faking authorship of Pink Floyd songs. Younger son Frank, aged - what? - ten or eleven, takes to masturbating and smearing his semen in public places, and to alcohol.
If all this makes it seem utterly grim, that could not be further from the truth. The film is not (or not only) uplifting in a Richard Yates way, for its honesty in portraying misery. It is bitterly brilliant, painfully funny, and with an almost non-stop series of great lines and scenes, mostly involving the self-involved Berkman Sr. One reviewer on imdb.com, who knew Jonathan Baumbach, the basis for Bernard Berkman, says that Daniels "amazingly, underplays the actual father."
Bernard: Joan, let me ask you something. All that work I did at the end of our marriage, making dinners, cleaning up, being more attentive. It never was going to make a difference, was it? You were leaving no matter what...
Joan: You never made a dinner.
Bernard: I made burgers that time you had pneumonia.
And the film is beautifully paced, too, with so many scenes cut short where other films would have played through until they became tiring or over-obvious. As a result, there is not a single boring moment in the entire film, which in fact comes in at well under 90 minutes.
It's quietly moving too, particularly in the central scene where son Walt explains to the psychotherapist that the only happy memory he can recall was when he was six years old, and doesn't involve his father. It also explains the title of the film, which comes back in the neat coda.
A vital film, and essential viewing.
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Format:DVD|Amazon Verified Purchase
Sometimes painful often very funny I enjoyed this film with its witty dialogue and satirizing of academic pretensions about English literature criticism. So many US films are geared to the teen market, but this was a film for people who have experienced some of the vicissitudes of relationships and family life. The characters were sympathetically portrayed. Nothing was black and white: every character had good and bad points-just like real-life iteractions between people. All the acting was excellent, especially the two sons.
I wouldn't rate this as one of the greatest films ever made, but it was very well worth buying, and viewing again.
I wouldn't rate this as one of the greatest films ever made, but it was very well worth buying, and viewing again.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:DVD
I found this film quite deep and at points, quite uncomfortable watching. I felt it painted a real picture of what the two boys went through during their parents divorce from their own perspective more than focusing on the parent's own issues with one another. Both boys seem seriously affected by their parents separation and living different lives in different homes. You really feel for them as they go through the pains of finding out for themselves what to believe in and how to deal with their situation and get some perspective despite their opinionated, narrow minded Father. A good, interesting film. Very different and not what you'd call light entertainment.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Stunning portrait of a family in crisis
Brilliant portrait of the slow disintegration of an upper middle-class New York City
family in the 1980s, as the parents divorce, and their two sons are caught in the... Read more
family in the 1980s, as the parents divorce, and their two sons are caught in the... Read more
Published 6 months ago by K. Gordon
hopeful tragedy
While there has been no divorce in my larger family (knock on wood!), I see it around me so much that it is often on my mind. Read more
Published 9 months ago by rob crawford
Independent cinema at its best
Clocking in at barely over an hour and a quarter, the Squid and the Whale firmly contradicts the mantra that when it comes to films, long is better. Read more
Published 23 months ago by DJY
Superb look at a civilised break up.
I loved every minute of 'The Squid And The Whale', the idea of creating a film around a family in which both parents are liberal minded intellectuals, who make the decision the... Read more
Published 23 months ago by Ernie
Best Screenplay Ever?!
In my opinion yes, this film does have the best original screenplay I've ever come across.
This is due to how it manages to be both very tightly-knit yet totally... Read more
This is due to how it manages to be both very tightly-knit yet totally... Read more
Published 24 months ago by Fergus Pearson
the squid and the whale review
I am happy with the product sold to me, it didn't take too ,ong in then post and arrived in really good condition.
Published on 2 April 2010 by Peter Mclaren
Great dysfunctional family drama.
I was introduced to this film by my friend Sam, who is mad about all things independent and outside the mainstream. Read more
Published on 25 Feb 2010 by Mr. Te Stringer
Simply wonderful
I write this partly to offset the reviewers who have either misunderstood this perfect jewel of a film, or who simply don`t have the patience for such a wittily nuanced work of art... Read more
Published on 2 Jan 2010 by GlynLuke
Don't touch this with a barge pole.....
I bought this on the strength of various reviews, including a five-star rave in the usually most reliable Irish Times. It is positively awful. Read more
Published on 29 May 2009 by Mr Paul English
I was hesitant about watching this
as the reviews had been excellent and I thought I would be disappointed. I was not. It is very well acted and shows the sadness of divorce on the whole family but there is a... Read more
Published on 13 Mar 2008 by Mama England
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