>>PREVIEW
THE SQUID AND THE WHALE
STARRING Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney and Jesse Eisenberg
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY Noah Baumbach
Opens Friday, October 28
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We’ve all heard Angela Carter’s famous quote that comedy is tragedy that happens to other people, but rarely is that distinction so palpable as in writer-director Noah Baumbach’s new film, The Squid and the Whale.
A family drama, the film centres on the Berkmans, a uniquely unhappy clan living in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighbourhood in the mid-1980s. Their unhappiness stems partly from a seldom voiced but frequently apparent intellectual rivalry between father, Bernard (Jeff Daniels), and mother, Joan (Laura Linney). Both are writers, although his literary career is clearly on the decline, and hers is just beginning to arc towards the limelight. It is the effect of the resulting tension on sons Walt (Jesse Eisenberg), 16, and Frank (Owen Kline), 12, that gives the film its remarkable perspectives on both the insecurity of adolescence and the pressures endured by a family in collapse.
It doesn’t sound like funny stuff, especially to anyone who has experienced separation or divorce, but given Baumbach’s attention to detail and willingness to be true to his own experiences as a teenager, The Squid and the Whale is able to tap into the humour of its painful situations, bridging the gap between tragedy and comedy.
"As long as people have a strong reaction to it, I’m open to whatever it is – whether they find it hilarious or sad or both," says Baumbach, who could be forgiven for wanting to provoke a reaction, any reaction, with his movie. Baumbach has been present on the American independent film scene in the United States for a decade or so, although he’s hardly what one would call a household name. His debut, Kicking and Screaming (1995), though an extremely well-written slacker comedy, is most often remembered for Quentin Tarantino’s ad libbed deconstruction of the homoerotic subtext in Top Gun. Baumbach’s sophomore film, Mr. Jealousy (1997), was lauded by the few who saw it, but made even less of a popular impact than his first film. He made a third film as well, Highball (1997), but he doesn’t take credit for it ("Highball wasn’t even a movie!" he quips) and to this day it remains hard to find on video.
In any case, it wasn’t until Baumbach’s name appeared as co-writer of last year’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, directed by Wes Anderson (who also produced The Squid and the Whale), that his career began to take stride once more. Although Baumbach is no sycophant, he has learned certain things from his experience with Anderson, and he is particularly reverent about Anderson’s discipline and tenacity when it comes to getting the details exactly the way he wants them.
"He’s confident and fearless enough to know to constantly ask questions," Baumbach says. "On my previous two movies, there may have been scenes where I knew on some level that I could do better, but I wasn’t open to admitting that. Wes knows there is no shame in admitting that a scene, you know, might not be there yet.
"On this movie, I really did stick to my guns. The details, in some way, are what the movie is about. I knew I couldn’t settle for less."
Baumbach adds that his newfound confidence has made The Squid and the Whale something of a creative breakthrough for him. He says he has become more trusting of his instincts, more open and a little more raw with respect to his emotions. This is evident even in something as simple as the grainy, de-saturated look of the film. Baumbach shot the movie with hand-held cameras on Super 16, a format that lends itself to emotional immediacy, at once reminiscent of home movies or old photographs, yet at the same time very natural and unaffected.
So much so, in fact, that it seems at times that Baumbach may be revealing unadulterated autobiography, re-creating scenes from his youth. But he insists this is not so.
"By the time we were shooting the movie, it felt very much like a movie to me," Baumbach says. "Certainly, when writing, I could tap into anger or sadness or pain…. But even those things are fleeting. My emotional life might inform the scene, but then you rework (it) and make it work."
This willingness to push the material until it resonated beyond his own experience is what makes The Squid and the Whale so compelling, even as it deals with subject matter that is often uncomfortable. The characters, as played by some of the finer actors of our time, are complex assemblages of sympathetic and repellent qualities. And that, of course, provokes a wide range of responses.
"Some people say, ‘Oh, Bernard is such an asshole,’ and other people say ‘I felt so sorry for him.’ I don’t pass judgment on them. I really have affection for all of them."
Still, Baumbach admits that this made the film more difficult to finance, quipping that complexity of character is not viewed as a bankable commodity by the majority of film industry executives. Nevertheless, he was persistent, shooting the film on a very low budget, but for the first time in his career getting the movie that he wanted.
"I understood on an intellectual level that the more specific and true to yourself you are, the more universal it will feel. But it’s a hard thing sometimes to trust that."
Baumbach has succeeded impeccably, possibly suggesting that comedy is not so much rooted in an ability to laugh at others as much as in an ability to laugh at oneself. |
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