PLOT: Set among the intelligensia of Brooklyn in the 1980s, this is the ruthless tale of a marriage in crisis. While the parents set to battle, their two sons suffer collateral damage.
Anyone who has gone through a contentious divorce knows the situation is rife with both comedy and tragedy.
The cruel comedy comes into focus most easily when looking back, especially if you do so as courageously as U.S. filmmaker Noah Baumbach.
As a result, his tragi-comic film The Squid And The Whale -- a semi-autobiographical story based on the experiences of his own parents -- is an emotional stunner.
The film will have adult audiences laughing, squirming and perhaps even crying in equal measure. We are witnesses to authentic truths about life after love has mutated and lapsed.
If that sounds dismal to you, then I am not emphasizing the giddy tone of the film forcefully enough. Then there is the sheer pleasure of watching a unified collection of superb performances. All the actors in Baumbach's film serve the narrative without concern for ego or pandering.
At the core is the enormously under-rated Jeff Daniels, who is raw and confrontational as the husband (the family name here is Berkman, not Baumbach). Laura Linney, who can do no wrong, is the wife. Both are gifted writers, part of the intelligensia of Brooklyn in the 1980s.
The bushy-bearded husband, who lectures on literature, is arrogant and dismissive, quick to judge his inferiors and yet eaten up by the acid of personal failure. He cannot get his latest novel published. So he lashes out. And he's a miser.
The wife, whose secrets and lies are just as corrosive as her husband's, is now blossoming as a published writer (in real life, the filmmaker's mother is former Village Voice film critic Georgia Brown). Her newfound success ratchets up the competitive nature of the failing marriage.
Caught on the battleground and emotionally wounded are two sons. Jesse Eisenberg plays the eldest, a wannabe clone of his pompous intellectual father. Owen Kline plays the youngest, a fragile loner who sides with his mother but acts out his frustrations through aberrant sexual behaviour.
In support roles crucial to the success of the overall story are Anna Paquin, as a Lolita-esque writing student whom Daniels cultivates, and William Baldwin as a Zen-like tennis teacher who fancies Linney.
The beauty of the film is its clear-headed maturity (despite the misleading title that sounds childlike, although it relates to a story episode at the Museum of Natural History). When we are too close to a nasty piece of business, like a divorce, there is no perspective. There is anger, bitterness, acting out.
Baumbach, however, offers perspective. We are thrust close enough to the people in the drama to feel part of their emotional world, yet far enough removed to see the big picture.
As writer-director, Baumbach wisely refuses to preach. Each core character is drawn in sharp focus, for better, for worse. None is a hero, none a true villain. This is an unvarnished portrait of lives really lived. That has value.
BOTTOM LINE: Despite a silly title that wrongly makes this sound like a children's fantasy, Noah Baumbach's tragi-comic film is a gripping, slice-of-life drama for adults. It was a special presentation at the Toronto filmfest.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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