“The Squid and the Whale” (2005)
Cruel, hilarious, and nothing short of heartbreaking in its emotional impact, “The Squid and the Whale” stands as perhaps the most pivotal creative turning point to date for its talented writer-director. The film conspicuously moves away from the talky and sometimes outright goofy comedy of his first movies, steering instead towards something legitimately painful. So while it contains many funny moments – often at the expense of William Baldwin, as an oblivious tennis instructor with a bad hair-metal ‘do – fundamentally, it is a tragedy about a family blindsided by their own narcissism. The temptation to brand the film as “autobiographical” is hard to resist: Baumbach did grow up in Brooklyn in the 1970’s, one of four siblings, to a pair of parents who both wrote for a living (his father Jonathan wrote novels and short fiction, while his mother Georgia Brown contributed regularly to the Village Voice). But wherever it derives its power from, “The Squid and the Whale” works on your nerves and heartstrings from its tense opening sequences, where passive-aggression ripples under every perfectly-articulated interaction, to its show-stopping finale at the American Museum of Natural History. The cast all deliver defining performances —there isn’t a weak one in the bunch: Jeff Daniels disguises crippling insecurity behind a mountain of haughty self-regard as the cheap, philandering father; Laura Linney seems capable of suggesting more with a look than some actors can with a ten-page monologue as the put-upon mother, while Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline (Kevin’s son) truly make us feel the naked pain of having your sense of childhood security brutally stripped away. The film also marks the second collaboration between Baumbach and friend Wes Anderson, who gets a producing credit here and who gave Baumbach feedback on the script (Baumbach had written “The Life Aquatic,” and the two would collaborate again on the delightful “Fantastic Mr. Fox”). Like its later companions “Margot at the Wedding” and “Greenberg,” “The Squid and the Whale” is a deeply sad comedy about how no amount of book learning and so-called academic knowledge can prepare you for the pain and disappointment that real life can bring. In that regard, it stands as one of the director’s finest accomplishments, and as the picture that returned him to the scene after a long hiatus, it transformed him from an under-the-radar talent to one of the sharpest filmmakers working today. [A]
“Margot at the Wedding” (2007)
In Baumbach’s rogues gallery of bad spouses, bad parents, bad siblings, and bad exes, it’s possible he never devised as utterly terrible a human as Margot in “Margot at the Wedding,” a part torn into with sharp-toothed, vivisectionary relish by a never-better Nicole Kidman. But while this scathing portrait of a triumphantly unlikeable (and surprisingly un-redeemed) character definitely has claws, it’s the film’s wickedly acid sense of humor — a facet that many critics at the time seemed to ignore entirely — that keeps it so compulsively watchable. Well, that and the standard-issue (for Baumbach), across-the board great performances, from Kidman at its center, but also a tremendous Jennifer Jason Leigh as Margot’s freer-spirited sister Pauline, Jack Black as Pauline’s cool-dude but shiftless fiancé, and John Turturro as Margot’s embattled husband, along with terrifically lived-in performances from its juvenile leads. What’s particularly to be admired about ‘Margot’ is just how few punches it pulls with that character, going hell-for-leather in making her the rarest of cinematic birds: a female antihero. So she’s not given cute, fixable, external problems; Margot is desperately fucked up from within, and it’s a soul-deep brokenness that sits alongside her character’s razor-sharp, almost animalistic intelligence, and that finds its easiest targets in the very people that her social roles suggest she should most protect: her husband, her sister, and most audaciously, her son Claude (Zane Pais). Her warping, self-interested exchanges with Claude, himself on the cusp of adulthood and subject suddenly to the full bore of his mother’s psychological profiling (oh, how she loves to “diagnose” everyone except herself), form some of the most acutely uncomfortable moments, as Margot refuses to conform to any maternal stereotypes, despite Claude’s steady, almost dazzled filial affection toward her. Widely criticized as simply too much of a downer at the time, the film has been rehabilitated quite a bit since, and it retains an absolutely keen cutting edge even eight years later, and even after Baumbach himself has taken another of his patented career about-turns, this time into the gentler and more joyous territory of his post-“Frances Ha” period. Sandwiched in quality and in chronology between its spiritual kin “The Squid and the Whale” and “Greenberg,” it’s very clear why “Margot at the Wedding” has earned a reputation as a tremendously difficult film to love. Lord knows, then, what it says about those of us who love it almost unreservedly. [B+]