The devolution from cohesion to fractured divisiveness is Baumbach’s primary focus, in terms of both the legal ramifications of Bernard and Joan’s split (which party gets the brownstone, the cat, etc.) and, more fundamentally, with regards to Walt and Frank’s struggles to carve out individual identities influenced by (but nonetheless unique from) their parents’ domineering personas. Attuned to the texture and sounds of its bourgeois Park Slope, Brooklyn locale, The Squid and the Whale painstakingly stages the minor squabbles and major quarrels that accompany divorce, from parents’ dueling power plays concerning custody issues, to the bitterness born from sneaky, selfish, uncompromising disputes over ownership of jointly accumulated material goods, to the more corrosive act of one insecure elder recruiting the children to surreptitiously spy on (and report back about) the other. Though its tale of parentally inept NYC intellectuals is akin to a more streamlined, compact, and intimate variation of The Royal Tenenbaums, Baumbach’s film substitutes Wes Anderson’s ironic preciousness for a more blunt confrontation of its characters’ mixed-up, distraught emotions. Fought with both straightforward and passive-aggressive tactics, the once-nuclear family’s contentious split quickly devolves into a nasty tag-team scrum in which sides are drawn among haughtily erudite novelist and professor Bernard (Jeff Daniels) and loyal 16-year-old son Walt in one corner, and his aspiring writer and adulteress wife Joan (Laura Linney) and troubled, masturbation-crazy 12-year-old son Frank (Owen Kline) in the other. Set in 1986, the writer-director’s semi-autobiographical third feature charts the fallout from the disintegration of the Berkman clan, a state of affairs propelled by years of unrelenting disappointment and long-suppressed resentment. All four protagonists in Noah Baumbach’s painfully sincere and delightfully silly film are, in some form or another, similarly wounded, fractured, and lost, clumsily and miserably attempting to navigate the internal, interpersonal, and logistical schisms created by marital dissolution. When Walt (Jesse Eisenberg), The Squid and the Whale’s angry and confused son of divorcing parents, passes off Pink Floyd’s “Hey You” as an original composition at a talent show, it’s not simply a symbol of the teen’s all-consuming denial but also-as the song’s repeated lyrics elucidate-a desperate and compassionate cry for help.
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