Is it courting disaster to invite an achingly funny – and then again just painful – dramedy about marital dysfunction into your living room?
That might be the question you ponder with the DVD release of writer-director Noah Baumbach’s “The Squid and the Whale” (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, $26.96).
Just remember that whatever sting you feel as you chuckle, Baumbach felt it more. He based the script on his childhood and his parents’ divorce.
“I’m really touched and flattered that people see the movie and say, ‘Oh you’re so brave to put yourself nakedly out there,”‘ said the filmmaker, on the phone from New York. “To me it’s just the opposite. I completely constructed it. I feel protected by it.”
Last year Baumbach won best-screenplay and best-director awards at the Sundance Film Festival, where the movie premiered. “The Squid and the Whale” hoarded nominations throughout 2005, including Golden Globe nods for stars Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney, and one for best picture comedy or musical. The script also was nominated for a best original screenplay Oscar.
Daniels and Linney play Bernard and Joan Berkman, who are living, as their marriage dies, in Brooklyn, N.Y.
It’s the mid-1980s and their sons Walt and Frank suffer the split in their own ways. Sixteen-year-old Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) defends his college professor father with a cringe-inducing intensity. Besides insisting that Dad is a more important writer than Mom (he’s not), he tells a girlfriend with a kind of mimicked superiority that a work by Kafka is, well, “Kafka-esque.” The wind doesn’t whip far from the blowhard.
Frank (Owen Kline), all of 12, sides with Mom a lot and seizes the slackening of parental control to tipple freely. He also takes to some fugitive acts of autoerotics that get Joan and Bernard hauled into the principal’s office. The location of Frank’s escapades might say more about Baumbach’s picture than all the parental bickering: the school library.
“The Squid and the Whale” is a warm movie about folk often treated as emotionally cool: intellectuals.
“My other movies are more cerebral and clever,” said Baumbach, who is married to actress Jennifer Jason Leigh. “I wanted to direct it as an emotional movie about intellectuals.”
Much has been made of the personal roots of this coming-
of-age story. Joan and Bernard are writers. Baumbach’s parents write. They also lived in Brooklyn and divorced in the ’80s. Like Walt, Baumbach has a younger brother.
There was a chance that the script would be more writing exercise, more personal exorcism than greenlit film.
“I felt writing it, this probably isn’t a movie,” he said. “I’m probably doing it for myself.”
Baumbach has been writing and directing for more than 10 years. At 26, he debuted with 1995’s “Kicking and Screaming.” He also collaborates with Wes Anderson. But if movies like “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou” get labled “whimsical,” Baumbach’s comedies gyrate with a truer spin.
What’s it like to craft a story that everyone knows – or at least believes – is about your nearest and dearest? The question dogs memoirists, but works fine here.
“First of all you can fool yourself when you’re writing on the computer screen that no one has to know,” he said.
But he discovered that “the better the script got – the more connected I got to it – the more fictionalized it became.”
