THE SQUID AND THE WHALE

Director: Noah Baumbach (Kicking and Screaming, Mr. Jealousy, The Life Aquatic (Writing credit))
Starring: Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney, Owen Kline, Jesse Eisenberg

I was a marginal fan of both Kicking and Screaming and Mr. Jealousy, but I tend to think these films suffer from a degree of tunnel vision by the writer. The scripts seemed to be nearly autobiographical works that didn't quite know anything apart from the little worlds they inhabited. It's not that these scripts didn't know their audience, it's that they didn't appear to know there was an audience.

Both stories swirled around groups of smart buffoons. That seems nice enough, but in the end I found little that was appealing to anyone who wasn’t well acquainted with and a proponent of smart buffoonery. What's more, neither story could make up its mind what it really thought of its characters. This film knows better. This film is better.

Once again this story is precisely about a bright idiot, and this time it’s the most idiotic of the bunch. The plot involves two children confronting the dueling personalities of their divorcing parents. The father, played superbly by Jeff Daniels, is a foolish, egocentric, emotionally stunted writer convinced of his own importance. The character is massively incomplete as a functioning adult, and though deep down he may know this, he very well may not. He marks himself as an intellectual, but really his views on life have nothing to do with great thoughts, but rather rise directly from his own childish needs. He is one of the most flawed fools I’ve seen on screen in many years, but he's also entirely believable. The mother is less fleshed out, but she is at the least much preferable to the father.

The story follows the children as they come to realize that their father, who they thought was so bright, may not have been so right in the end. One child reaches this epiphany by dissecting a single memory of his more caring mother at the natural history museum, in an exhibit about a squid and a whale - hence the title.

The film worked on a psychological level, on an emotional level, and surprising to me, on an entertainment level. I found the film very, very funny. I’m reminded of A Confederacy of Dunces in this regard. Both stories had a great deal of fun mocking their pompous main characters.

This was a delightful little film that owes very much to Jeff Daniels. His character creation was very much noteworthy. I hope some award nominations very much come his way.

Standouts: Jeff Daniels performance as the selfish, and foolish father.
Blowouts: Some gruesome psychological problems with the children. I don’t know if they really needed to show the kid masturbating on everything to show he was messed up. Minor complaint, I guess.

Grade: A-

12/12/2005