Baumbach: The Squid and the Whale (2005)

In some ways, The Squid and the Whale feels like Noah Baumbach beginning again, leaving behind the stilted, insular cosmopolitanism of Kicking and Screaming for something considerably looser, airier and more provisional. This time around, Baumbach draws on his childhood rather than his college days, crafting a loosely autobiographical film about his experience of his parents’ divorce and the dissolution of his family home. That might sound a little dour, but the very looseness of the film is a kind of joy, not least because of Baumbach’s decision to shoot on Super 8 film, which is perhaps what allows him to so powerfully evoke divorce as an emergent experience, untethered from any straightforward or unqualified emotion. At the heart of it all is Walt Berkman (Jesse Eisenberg), whose world is turned upside down when his parents – Bernard (Jeff Daniels) and Joan (Laura Linney) – announce that they’re getting a divorce, and that Bernard will be moving out of their Park Slope home. Their reasons are not immediately obvious, at least not to Walt, but that doesn’t prevent him immediately siding with his father, just as his younger brother Frank (Owen Kline) gravitates towards their mother. As the relationship between Bernard and Joan deteriorates, however, it becomes more ambient, not exactly diminishing but filling more and more of the space between them – the space where most of the film takes place, as the boys seem to spend more of their time commuting between their parents than actually visiting them, opening up a wonderful, incidental vision of 1980s New York at the corners of the screen. In the process, they start to fill in the blank spaces of their parents’ relationship – sometimes wittingly, sometimes unwittingly – mourning their parents as a couple even as they’re drawn into an awkward, discomforting but also quite transformative communion with them as individuals, stranger and more seductive than anything they've experienced before. On the one hand, that forces Bernard and Joan into ever more preocious styles of parenting, which leads to some of the most comic moments in the film, especially from Bernard, a famous writer who’s fallen upon hard times and is anxious to resurrect his once-adoring fanbase in the guise of his children. At the same time, though, it beautifully captures the trauma and wonder of children encountering their parents as individuals for the first time, an experience that feels preposterously worldly but also mimetically infantile, as Walt and Hank are forced to grow up as never before while somehow being forced back upon their most childhood selves at the same time. The result is a beautiful bittersweetness that feels almost nostalgic for those first few tremulous days and weeks of living with divorced parents, the emergent sense of possibility that is so fragile and fleeting that Baumbach can end the film a little over 75 minutes in without it ever feeling incomplete. Every beginning feels like an ending, and every breathless threshold is tinged with anticipatory nostalgia, as Walt and Frank finally only seem to enjoy spending time with one parent for the sake of anticipating the other, always running, careening and commuting towards what seems like their real home - whether with Joan in Park Slope or at Bernard's new place in Prospect Park - only to realise that they've left home behind the moment they arrive. Nostalgic for the future that seems to be eluding them more with every scene, their first few days and weeks gradually come to feel like the last few days and weeks of the baby boomer experiment as well, the last moments before divorce became a baby boomer institution, which is perhaps why the film manages to achieve such an expansive, elegiac register despite its brevity, haunted by an autumnal 60s soundscape that segues into the Risky Business soundtrack before our very eyes.