Breaking Up Is Hard to Write About

The Squid and the Whale (2005; d. Noah Baumbach, s. Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney, and bad m.f.'s Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline).

Wow.

Just...wow.

I promised (myself) that I wouldn't go 'dear diary' style on this thing, in part because to paraphrase my friend, I don't always find my week more interesting than anyone else's life. Still, it's a little pertinent context here (kinda like my own personal spin on The Great 'Critics Like Sideways Because It Gives Them Hope Middle Aged Frumpy White Guys CAN Fuck Virginia Madsen" Theorem posited by A. O. Scott last year).

My parents divorced when I was 5 . Since I was so young, and they were so present in my life, I never thought it had too much of an effect. I just kept right on putting one foot in front of the other. It was only after I went through my own first serious break up, which just happened to coincide with my dad's separation (and subsequent divorce) from my stepmother, that a lot of things started falling into place. Like how fast I fell in love with a girl I barely knew. Like how I had always harbored secret fantasies of marrying before I was 22 (that snort you hear is my parents laughing somewhere). And like how the freakiest part of my breakup was the gloomy inevitability when it actually happened--no shock, just a deep sigh of resignation and a whole lotta life goes on.

But I was younger then, and I'm so much older now.

Anyway...Squid and the Whale hits close to home. And, as the Man said, I was dreaming when I wrote this, so sue me if I go too fast,

but I took in the miracle of this film two days ago and I can't let it sit but I can't figure out exactly how to crawl inside it either. Which is how I know it must be love. So here are my unfinished thoughts on The Squid and the Whale:

Hacktastic Pull-Quote: The Squid and the Whale is an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, as directed by Wes Anderson. This isn't the movie pitch. It's the only accurate way to talk about the emotional tone of the movie. It has the sly, hilarious, misanthropic, anxiety-ridden, angry bitterness of Larry David's magnum opus, while simultaneously brimming with the humanist, melancholic miniaturism of Wes Anderson's best. How's that for effusive?

I guess the worry when you walk into a movie like this, like a Wes Anderson or a Larry David project, is that it's going to be so inside its own ass that there will be no room to breathe (cf. the last Seinfeld episode, or to a certain segment of the population, the entire Wes Anderson filmography--we hate this segment of the population, BTW). It certainly slowed me down from seeing the movie. Plus, for the above-noted reasons, it's just hard to watch this kind of thing.

Like the characters in Wes Anderson's movies and Larry David's comedies, the characters in this movie are completely trapped in their own concerns, their own narcissism, and their own narrow world views. However, these characters are more recognizably self-involved--it's hard for us to separate them out. Wes Anderson springs his revelations as traps, letting us comfortably work through the emotional resonances in displacement, by making the concerns of his characters more oddball.

This movie is about putting you in there with the semen and the shouting, and as a result is much harder to watch. And more laugh-out loud funny. And, as the best movie about divorce ever (up yours Kramer vs. Kramer), Squid and the Whale captures a universal in its specifities. It's about how relationships succeed and fail as a function of the complementary flaws of the people involved, and how people who are absolutely wise and brilliant can absolutely fail to have the words to express what they are feeling. And how we solve the failure of the relationship by laying blame and taking blame as individuals. The key mystery of the Squid and the Whale is solved when you see that the predator and prey are equals, and intertwined such that it is impossible to see where one ends and the other begins--or even necessarily who is predator and who is prey--the impassive, massive, lumbering whale, or the quick, many-tentacled, mysterious squid.

And, most insidiously, it implies that the whole process is the most natural thing in the world.

Hacktastic Pull-Quote #2: Dakota Fanning is Owen Kline's bitch. Man, get this power duo in a movie stat--maybe this should have been the cast for the little kid Woody Allen movie earlier this year.

This kid gives the most foul-mouthed, brave, relentless, hilarious, and sad performance of the year--I worry for the state of Kevin and Phoebe's marriage, because he inhabits the emotions with the divorce so fully. He's got the look in his eye of pain and fractured identity, and you buy it all the way down. I don't think kids are supposed to be able to do this; it's only as an adult that you can forcefully diffuse your identity this way. But he manages it, and becomes the vehicle for the sadness in the movie while his older counterparts struggle not to deal with the truths.

Everybody will talk about Jeff Daniels. Rightfully so. Everybody should talk about Laura Linney and Jesse Eisenberg. Rightfully so. But Viva Owen Kline.

n.b., I will explain the Theorem of Dakota Fanning at some later date. It involves what she did to these men:

I didn't see a more affecting movie last year, which still feels like damning this film with faint praise. I have often said that Walker Percy is my favorite novelist, because he has a way of noticing the little bit of magic in the ordinary that we are elated by everyday, and finding the exact words to communicate the poignancy of that observation. They are literally magic words. And that is how I feel about this movie. It's the magic words.

Next Time: Uptown Girls