Fighting Words

He ain't heavy: Brothers Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) and Frank Berkman (Owen Kline). Photo James Hamilton/Capri Films.

Literary biographies teach us that it’s not easy being the child of a famous writer. Just ask F. Scott Fitzgerald’s daughter, or any of Hemingway’s kids. Heck, ask Adam Cohen, his career forever darkened by the shadow of his legendary pop.

Noah Baumbach’s ruthless and uproarious new film, The Squid and the Whale, informs us that it isn’t much easier being the son of writers who are even marginally well-known. But if it isn’t fame that fouls things up, it might just be the egocentric licence society grants artists of any stripe.

The film, set in Brooklyn in 1986, draws on the failed marriage of Baumbach’s own parents, experimental novelist Jonathan Baumbach and former Village Voice film critic Georgia Brown. How closely Baumbach fils hews to his autobiography is beside the point; the film’s milieu is wholly authentic and sharply depicted. The picture’s fairy tale-like title is deceptive: unless you want to give your offspring a crash course in the painful and absurd tumult of divorce, this is not a movie for kids. But it is one of the best films in a long time about growing up.

The Squid and the Whale opens with the Berkman family on an indoor tennis court. Twelve-year-old Frank (Owen Kline) cries out to his older brother, “Mom and me versus you and Dad,” a blunt drawing of battle lines that become more pronounced as the film unfolds. Bernard (Jeff Daniels) is a tetchy novelist and college professor given to railing against “philistines” and the lesser novels of Charles Dickens; Joan (Laura Linney) is a more nurturing, though still self-absorbed author who’s just sold her first novel to Knopf. Bernard’s star is growing dim just as hers is on the rise; his agent has just rejected his latest avant-garde opus.

The life of the mind: Bernard Berkman (Jeff Daniels). Photo James Hamilton/Capri Films.

Daniels is almost unrecognizable, his Stan Laurel-like mug lost in a thick beard that looks like an upside-down coonskin cap; the sneering, pompous Bernard would eat Daniels’s usual Everyman alive. Given Bernard’s narcissism, it’s no surprise that his reverential older son, 16-year-old Walt (Rodger Dodger’s Jesse Eisenberg), has modeled himself after his dad. Just as Bernard will claim Kafka as one of his “predecessors,” Walt will tell his girlfriend that The Metamorphosis is “Kafkaesque.” “Well, obviously. Didn’t he write it?” she responds, perplexed. Under self-imposed pressure to please his father, Walt later tries to pass off Pink Floyd’s Hey You as his own composition at a school talent show.

Comparisons to Woody Allen are inevitable; Baumbach hones in on the smug snobbery of New York’s intelligentsia that has often been Allen’s subject. But the senior auteur’s self-portraits always contain, to some degree, a dose of self-congratulation. Baumbach is much more clear-eyed, less forgiving — especially of himself. If Walt is Baumbach as a boy, he’s a callow, needy plagiarist and conformist.

Soon enough, Joan initiates a divorce. (It’s a testament to the film’s resolute unsentimentality that the boys learn the news just after she’s been to the loo; as Joan enters the living room from a nearby bathroom, Walt waves his hand in front of his nose and moans, “Mom!”) Walt blames her for trying to destroy the family. It’s the younger, foul-mouthed Frank, however, who suffers the most. His loyalty pinned more tightly to Joan, Frank expresses his dismay and anger in increasingly disquieting ways. The joint-custody arrangement — in which the boys spend one night with Joan and the next with Bernard — pleases no one, especially when the parents try to take on new, improbable lovers.

Family huddle: The Berkmans confer. Photo James Hamilton/Capri Films.

For Baumbach — whose previous films include Kicking and Screaming (1995) and Mr. Jealousy (1997) — the pretensions and neuroses of the bohemian class can mask and even encourage a sinister selfishness and myopia. Both parents turn the kids into spies, and while Joan allows Frank to slip into a nascent alcoholism, Bernard insists on taking Walt and his reluctant girlfriend to see Blue Velvet. It’s refreshing that the kind of redemption one expects from a film like this never comes. The only characters that actually seem to change are the boys.

The last Baumbach vehicle to make it into movie theatres was the Wes Anderson picture The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), which Baumbach co-wrote. Despite that film’s failings — many critics, including this one, thought it Anderson’s worst — the two directors obviously remain tight: Anderson produced The Squid and the Whale, and his regular cinematographer, Robert Yeoman, shot it. The affinity is apparent. Both Anderson and Baumbach have an interest in wayward patriarchs and an obsessive eye for original detail. But while Anderson can seem too fussy and clenched at times, Baumbach — more tolerant, though no less precise — allows the emotional turbulence of his tale to dictate its form. The camera can barely keep up with the Berkmans — they tug it along behind them like a pull toy. The film is pleasantly dense (it throbs with jokes, allusions, incidents) and brisk (just 80 minutes), a frantic pace suggestive of the confusion and desperation of its characters.

A lack of sentimentality hardly means a lack of empathy, and the film is extremely direct. Each of The Squid and the Whale’s principals is brilliant in their own way (although William Baldwin’s role as a tennis pro seems to have strayed from a Farrelly Brothers comedy), especially the young actors. Kline is a glumly comic presence: small and pale — the chip on his shoulder might weigh more than he does — he radiates bewilderment, heartbreak, insecurity. Eisenberg practically matures before our eyes, morphing from abrasive, naïve teen into wise young man. The sins of the father (and mother) might be visited on the sons, but the two boys narrowly avoid being smothered by overweening pride. At the end, Walt seems like he might be the only adult in the picture — and he grows up to be a great filmmaker.

Jason McBride is a writer and editor in Toronto.