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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Noah Baumbach, the writer-director of the Sundance-winning "The Squid and the Whale," talks about the perils of joint custody and the odd microcosm of the intellectual family.
Jan 29, 2005 | Right around the time of my parents' divorce, movies like "Kramer vs. Kramer" (1979) and "Ordinary People" (1980) were playing in the theaters, and while the gut-wrenching arguments and melodramatic epiphanies in therapy loosely matched my experiences, it was the mundane details of daily life after my parents' separation that I found the most heartbreaking: those depressing cream-colored vertical blinds in my dad's new condo, or the way my mom let the bushes in the front yard become scraggly and untamed after my dad moved out.
It makes sense, then, that I'd have to wait for my peers to grow up to see a film that captures the child's experience of divorce with as much accuracy and humor as Noah Baumbach's "The Squid and the Whale." [Editor's note: Baumbach picked up the Dramatic Directing Award and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for the film at Sundance on Saturday.] The film focuses on the struggles of teenager Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) and his adolescent brother, Frank (Owen Kline), to navigate their parents' separation. After a few tense exchanges and late-night fights heard from behind closed bedroom doors, their parents, Bernard (Jeff Daniels) and Joan (Laura Linney), call a "family conference" and announce that they'll be separating, with the two kids spending exactly half of the week with each parent. The chaos that follows chronicles not only the strange ways the kids act out -- Walt parrots his father's self-important diatribes while Frank yells four-letter words at every opportunity -- but the ways their parents do, as well, from inappropriately honest confessions to their kids about infidelities to hiding books that they're afraid the other will take from the house.
Baumbach approaches his story with a keen ear for dialogue and an appreciation of those vivid moments that somehow end up defining what can be the most difficult time in a kid's life. While his first two movies, "Kicking and Screaming" (1995) and "Mr. Jealousy" (1998), were also filled with funny lines and memorable scenes (Who can forget Parker Posey in "Kicking and Screaming," trying to break up with her chumpy boyfriend while he mouths every word she says, until she finally starts laughing in spite of herself?), "The Squid and the Whale" is far more subtle but also more heart-wrenching than those films, and seems to mark a new level of achievement for Baumbach as a filmmaker.
In the lobby of the Marriott just off Main Street in Park City, Baumbach, 35, talked with me about the challenges of taking on such clearly autobiographical material.
There were so many times during this film where I found myself groaning in recognition. I'm guessing your film must be autobiographical.
It's funny. I've been dealing with this question a lot this week, but it's hard for me to judge, I think. In a certain way, when I was writing it, I did draw very directly from my experience. It's something I've never done before and I think on a personal level -- and I don't mean to be dramatic about this -- but just for me, it felt like a breakthrough, because I felt like I discovered the kind of writer and then, later, the kind of filmmaker that I was.
I wanted to make movies when I was really young, and I made "Kicking and Screaming" and I'm really proud of that movie, but it's weird, because the desire to make them and then the ability to make them and then to actually be able to draw upon whatever's inside of you didn't always match. On my previous two movies, there was often a feeling of, "OK, well, I guess that turned out that way." This is the first time I really felt like I was able to put what was inside my head out there. This is a long way around the barn to your question, but I think that came from writing very personally, which was all new to me, and not putting any filter up and not worrying about people's feelings and not worrying about whether or not it's commercial. So it's certainly inspired by my life. My parents did divorce when I was in high school, we did live in Park Slope. I think in some ways it feels more intimate and more real because of what's fictional about it, too. If it were more literally true, I think it would feel clunkier.
