The Squid and the Whale (USA) (Samuel Goldwyn) (2005) ***1/2Year: 2005iMDB
Director: Noah Baumbach Cast: Owen Kline, Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney, Jesse Eisenberg, William Baldwin
The Squid and the Whale is yet another story about a dysfunctional family, one that reminded me quite a lot of The Royal Tenenbaums or The Life Aquatic but perhaps with less outspoken humor and more disturbing dysfunctionality. This instills a more profound sense of uneasyness in most viewers who look for the exacerbated circumstances for comic relief but instead only find characters that are not particularly likeable even though one can notice how they do try to do the right thing only to fail in front of their overwhelming flaws.
Bernard (Jeff Daniels) is a pretentious writer who has not been able to publish anything for many years, yet he continues to show off his presumably superior intellect and sophistication. His wife Joan (Linney), who became a writer after she married Jeff, enjoys a simpler life but also literary success. Caught in between these two polar personalities are their two schol-age boys who each levitate more towards one parent and are trying to grow up and find their way through a divorce and a joint custody arrangement that is far from satisfying for either of them.
While highly praised by critics, particularly for the acting and screenplay, I have never fully grown to be a fan of the genre. I appreciate its humor and blunt truthfulness, yet I feel that the only message the movie conveys is that... "life is like this sometimes" but in a manner that does not quite raise an alert flag or awareness, but ends up being perceived as an aberration both by those that enjoy the movie as well as those that hate it.
Posted by TheCasualCritic on December 31, 2005 01:48 PM