The Squid and the Whale

This is a movie about the dissolution of an American family.

I saw it in the theater when it came out.  After it was over, I raced home and started writing a script about the dissolution of my own American family, which dissolved when I was roughly the same age as the older son in this movie.

Watched it again tonight.  Now I’m thinking, “Nope, I’m not going to finish that script.  Because I can’t write as well as this guy.”

This is simply one of the best written, best directed, best acted American films I think I’ve ever seen.  It could not be more straightforward, unfussy, unpretentious.  It could not be more naturalistic, better observed, unpredictable.

As a director, Noah Baumbach, like Ozu, has one shot.  With Ozu it’s the “camera sitting on the floor” shot, with Baumbach its the “handheld camera” shot.  A completely stock effect that you would have thought had run out of steam years ago, but it completely disappears here.  In Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives, you’re constantly thinking “Aha, he’s using a jittery, handheld camera to good effect here,” in The Squid and the Whale you don’t even realize that it’s there.

Why don’t you realize it?  Probably because the script is so freaking good.  Just really extraordinary.  Tiny little scenes of completely normal human behavior, tiny little gestures saying volumes about the characters without ever saying “Hey, did you get what that scene was about?”  Beginning toward the end of the scene, so that we have to do a little catchup to figure out what’s going on, having the dialogue be things that people are not saying as well as things they are.

Or maybe it’s because the direction and editing are so good.  Unselfconscious jump-cuts remove anything that isn’t important, whip-pans look accidental but then turn out to have a narrative or thematic link to the next scene, the camera stays close to faces but never in a way that says “Hey, this is a movie about faces.”  Scenes that would have been milked for their “dramatic import” here are presented as they would have been in real life, meaning, one rarely understands when an “important moment” is happening in one’s life.  It happens, and many years later one realizes what the important, life-changing, crossroads moment was.  No, scene after scene goes by of crushing importance, but it’s all moving too fast and with too much fidelity to life for something as clumsy as “drama” to enter into the picture.  That is, it doesn’t feel like you’re watching a scripted drama at all; it feels like a camera crew followed these four characters around for a few months, shot thousands of hours of film, and then edited it down to this.

Or maybe it’s the acting, which is simply some of the best I’ve ever seen.  I’ve always liked Jeff Daniels (who would dislike Jeff Daniels?) but his performance here as a faded, past-his-prime novelist and recently-divorced father is just one of the most astonishing I’ve ever seen.  And again, not calling attention to itself.  Incredibly detailed, thoughtful, lived-in.  I can’t remember a movie where I saw people thinking on screen so much.  Laura Linney, who’s always good, is equally mesmerizing as the mother.  And then there’s the two teenage boys, Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline, who give two of the most detailed adolescent performances I’ve ever seen.

For a movie with no “plot” per se, it crackles with intensity and flies by in a breathless (pun intended, you’ll see what I mean) 81 minutes.

This movie is a miracle.