At Katie’s invitation, I joined her at the Chelsea Clearview Cinema tonight to watch The Squid and the Whale. The director, Brooklyn boy Noah Baumbach, was most recently recognized as the co-writer of Wes Anderson’s love-it-or-hate-it The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. The guys are friends, the same age and seem to share a love of Manhattan and quirky senses of humor.
The biggest similarity between the two films is the speed, wit and near uncomfortable deadpan directness of the dialogue. People curse at themselves, at each other, and say cruel things to each other.
In Baumbach’s film, such qualities make more sense, because he doesn’t share Anderson’s obsession with colorful minor characters, among other painstakingly crafted set dressings. The Squid and the Whale is quirky but realistic.
Jeff Daniels is amazing as a self-obsessed, washed-up author relegated to teaching creative writing classes and spouting emotionless book-knowledge about great works of literature. He’s good enough that I think I can remember him now for this role and not the one I’ve associated him with for the past 10 years: his jackass role in Dumb and Dumber.
Laura Linney is strong and smarter than Daniels’ character (and a more successful writer, to his disgruntlement). They separate and share the kids and she’s infinitely more forgiving and understanding that any other human would rightly be with the brood of idiot man-children that surround her (including a love interest of hers, a tennis pro played by Billy Baldwin, who looks like he wandered over drunk from his conversion van).
Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline are great as the family’s sons rife with painfully embarrassing and awkward adolescent emotions and actions. I only read afterwards that the movie is autobiographical, with Eisenberg’s character substituting for Baumbach’s as a child. Good grief that there was really ever a family as dysfunctional as this one, although there may be some artistic license at work.
Eisenberg wants to be accepted by his father to a degree that he finds himself repeating Dad’s vapid views on literature without even realizing it, referring at one point to “The Metamorphosis” as Kafkaesque, until his girlfriend gently points out that’s because Kafka wrote it. He pilfers a song from Pink Floyd’s The Wall as his own acoustic guitar composition during a talent show at his school. The movie comes to an abrupt end as he realizes what and who are important in his life. The suddenness at first irritated me, until I realized it was a craftily direct way to avoid the inevitable “boy sets off on road to young manhood to move on/fulfill his dreams/get the girl/etc.” scene.
Finally, New York movies filmed here (and not Vancouver) make me happy. Sets include Park Slope, Central Park, many subway trains and stations, and the American Museum of Natural History, a certain exhibit in which gives the film its title and key plot point.
Post-movie, we scuttled a few doors down to Burritoville for dinner. I got the same nachos I did last time and Katie got the Bob Marley jerk-chicken burrito, which suffered from some buckshot-like semicooked rice. After the cold rain died down, we stayed on 23rd and had drinks at East of Eighth. The bartender was new or in a generous mood, as my Glenlivet was served in a drinking glass, filled to the halfway mark.