As a rule, it’s good to be wary of the autobiographical purge. Even when we’re not being taken for an absolute ride – stand up JT LeRoy, whoever you are – watching someone exorcise personal demons often holds all the thrills of a self-indulgent tour around a random stranger’s smalls drawer. Wonder then at Noah Baumbach’s exhilarating fourth feature, The Squid And The Whale, an intensely personal satire inspired by his parent’s 1990 divorce and early contender for Best Film of 2006.
As the marriage disintegrates, things get bad before they get literary. Dad (Jeff Daniels) is a college lecturer and novelist on the wane. While his appeal becomes increasingly selective, his warring estranged wife (Laura Linney) is finding work at The New Yorker.
He’s a pathologically pompous, competitive cheapskate. She’s a self-absorbed careerist. They fight about her writing. They fight over who gets the books. But mostly, they fight over the children, who mimic their parents’ appalling behaviour in hilariously fucked-up ways. Walt, the older boy (Jesse Eisenberg from Roger Dodger), parrots his father’s pretentiousness, calling The Metamorphosis ‘very Kafka-esque’ and displaying sniffy disregard for mom. “She’s not really a writer,” he tells younger brother, Frank.
Mom’s affair with a moronic tennis coach (Baldwin) only incenses Walt further. As her sordid sexual history comes to light, Frank takes to rubbing semen around the school walls. Then, as if to provide an icky Freudian punch-line, Jeff Daniels moves student minx Anna Paquin into his new dump across the park (Paq-hounds may remember he played her father in Fly Away Home).
Utilising verbal jousting as a default setting, the film immediately recalls Salinger’s Glass family stories or The Royal Tenenbaums. But unlike Wes Anderson, Baumbach is never cold or academic in his depiction of New York intelligentsia. Heartbreaking, barbed and always good-natured, The Squid And The Whale embraces its characters warmly, while mercilessly ribbing them. It plays out like a charmingly inverted Tolstoy observation. Every family finds happiness in its own demented way.