Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale centers around the divorce of Bernard and Joan Berkman (played to perfection by Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney), yet this is not really a film about divorce. Rather, it is one of the most sensitive coming-of-age stories this generation has yet produced.

             Much has been written about Baumbach's pedigree as the son of Georgia Brown, respected film critic, and Jonathan Baumbach, respected novelist. He absorbed the values and culture of the New York intellectuals he was brought up with, and claimed in an interview with Deborah Solomon to "still carry the residue of the pressure [he] felt as a child to read and appreciate the right books" (New York Times, 9 Oct 05).

             After attending the highly competitive Vassar College in rural NY, Baumbach went on to direct a series of independently-produced feature films that met with some acclaim. The first of these was Kicking and Screaming—a film about “post-college syndrome” that has attained a small cult following—followed by Mr. Jealousy and Highball. At the same time, he was working on a script that would draw heavily from his own childhood experiences. In 2000 it got into the hands of Linney, who promised to appear in the film when the financing was raised. And after a side job co-writing The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou with Wes Anderson, Baumbach finally got to direct his long-gestating script—which of course became The Squid and the Whale.

Me and Mom versus you and Dad.
An excessively competitive family game of doubles tennis.

             These are the first things we hear and see in the film, and already we have been told a great deal about the Berkman family. And with apologies to Woody Allen, the most effective tennis metaphor in an Opening Scene of the Year award goes to Baumbach and Co. when younger son Frank (Owen Kline) sides with his Mom while brother Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) proudly joins their father, who gives some questionable advice regarding his wife's backhand stroke. But even if The Squid and the Whale is not really about divorce, it is about divisions, about clashing forces—the mother and the father, the intellectual and the philistine, the appearance of things and their true nature, and finally, the squid and the whale. Underlying each of these conflicts, and every scene in the film, is the battle between cynical detachment and vulnerability.

             Critic Chris Vognar wrote, "We cringe when we see Walt turning into a shallow mini-monster, but he's only emulating what he knows best" (Dallas Morning News, 28 Oct 05).

             Apparently, Walt has learned from his father only how to hide his feelings and, often, his ignorance behind a reference-heavy jargon that passes for intellectualism. And it is from that place that we are taken through key moments in Walt’s development into an individual, the most key being a compulsory visit to the school psychiatrist that caught him off-guard and set the foundation for his process of self-discovery:

"Isn't that kind of a stock question for a shrink?" Walt retorts when asked to recall a pleasant memory in his life.

"Yes. That's basically how this works," the doctor responds.

             In a day in which nothing is new and Americans goes to the movies to laugh at people who are stupider, crazier, more inept than they are, it is refreshing to watch a character on screen develop into someone where we are asked to be uncomfortable in our laughter, and to sympathize with a person who grows by admitting weakness.

             "I grew up in the heat of 70s postmodern fiction and post-Godard films,” Baumbach explained to Solomon, “and there was this idea that what mattered was the theory or meta in art. My film is emotional rather than meta, and that's my rebellion."

             Comparisons to Wes Anderson are not entirely unfounded. Anderson was a producer for the film, and his films also embrace a childlike perspective. On the other hand, this feels like a more adult treatment of family division than the self-consciously twee The Royal Tenenbaums, which is a wonderful film for different reasons. But it is worth mentioning that Anderson’s music supervisor, Randall Poster, also worked on The Squid and the Whale, so there are some similarities in the way music is used. However, Poster’s work on this film is slightly more esoteric and subtle.

             Baumbach and Poster essentially mine the British folk movement of the late 60s for various stages of melancholy and earthy beauty (four songs by the great Bert Jansch are featured, including "Courting Blues," as well as lost classics like Kate and Anna McGarrigle's "Heart Like A Wheel," Loudon Wainwright III's "Lullaby," and "The Swimming Song"), but the final masterstroke of the soundtrack is during the terms-coming last scene where Lou Reed's epic, "Street Hassle," propels Walt along his process while pulling you inside it.

             Realism means many things to many people—The Bicycle Thief is realistic, the CGI effects in Episode III aren't—yet the organic, true-to-life quality of every scene in The Squid and the Whale is what makes it such an exciting film, and what reassures erudite movie goers that personal, intelligent auteur cinema is still alive in a post-Cassavetes America.