The Squid and the Whale was by far my favourite of the movies I saw at this month's Vancouver International Film Festival. Ignore the fact that I only saw two. Squid is one of my favourites of any movie I've seen this year, anywhere. It's both charmingly bitter and bitterly funny, with compulsively watchable characters of varying degrees of unlikeability, and beautifully textured performances from the cast.
The tension between the Berkmans, Bernard (Jeff Daniels, Pleasantville) and Joan (Laura Linney, You Can Count on Me), is part emotional detachment, part power struggle. When they sit down with their sons, 16-year-old Walt (Jesse Eisenberg, Roger Dodger) and 12-year-old Frank (Owen Kline, son of Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates) to discuss their separation, even that fraught moment becomes a conflict over what will become of the cat in the new joint custody arrangement.
Bernard, once a famous writer, is now a professor who clings to his past glory and elevates his own ego by trampling on others', especially his eldest son's. He's such a master of it that Walt idolizes his father and imitates his insufferable elitism. Walt dismisses works he's never read as “minor Fitzgerald” and attempts to impress a girl by calling the ending to The Metamorphosis “Kafkaesque,” an adjective he's heard his dad use - causing her to mumble in confusion that, yes, it would be, given that Kafka wrote it.
Walt would be insufferable himself except that we see how he is manipulated by his father, who clings to the power he has over Walt while he flails to hold on to his precious identity. As Joan's writing starts to attract attention, the bewildered Bernard can't comprehend what his life has become. Exiled from the comfortable family home, he lives in a run-down place in a less prestigious neighbourhood and begins an affair with one of his students, Lili (Anna Paquin, who – ick - played Daniels' daughter in Fly Away Home), despite the fact that Walt is also attracted to her.
Article comments
1 - Scott Butki
Good review for a great movie.
Saw this last week and am still thinking about it.
Daniels gave an amazing performance.
2 - vica
i like it, but the ending was hard to understand. but i realize one thing. there's no good ending when your parents divorced. hope it won't happen to us.