Week of October 27, 2005, Issue #523
COVER
The ex-wife aquatic
By PAUL MATWYCHUK
Is Noah Baumbach’s new film The Squid and the Whale
autobiographical? “Well,” the 36-year-old writer/director slyly
replies, “it depends on who you are!”
There’s no denying that the film, which tells the story of the sad dissolution
of the marriage of Bernard and Joan Berkman and its painful effects on their
sons, teenaged Walt and 12-year-old Frank, contains several strong parallels
to Baumbach’s own life. Like Walt, Baumbach grew up in Park Slope, Brooklyn,
and in 1986 (when the film takes place) he and his brother were roughly the
ages of Walt and Frank. Like Bernard and Joan, Baumbach’s real-life parents
were a respected New York literary couple before their divorce; his father,
Jonathan Baumbach, is a widely anthologized novelist and short-story author,
while his mother, Georgia Brown, is a film critic who once wrote for the Village
Voice. Baumbach decorated the set with objects from his old home and even provided
Jeff Daniels, who plays Bernard, with some of his father’s actual clothes
to wear in the film.
But beyond surface similarities, Baumbach says The Squid and the Whale (the
title refers to a famously terrifying exhibit at the Museum of Natural History
that Walt thinks of as a metaphor for his battling parents) is no more autobiographical
than any other work of fiction. “I never really thought people would care
[how much of it was based on fact],” he says. “But I’m glad
they do, because I think it’s a testament to the effect of the movie—the
movie does feel like a real experience and it has a rawness that provokes the
question ‘Did this really happen?’ I certainly wasn’t thinking
about what was real and what wasn’t when I was making it; I was drawing
inspiration from everywhere to make the best movie I could.”
Baumbach has more than achieved his goal; not since Woody Allen’s Husbands
and Wives has a movie given us a portrait of New York-style divorce so truthful,
so painful and yet so witheringly funny. Jeff Daniels is the film’s biggest
revelation: he fully inhabits Bernard, this intellectual bully who doesn’t
talk with his family so much as toss off arrogant opinions on literature and
life and mock anybody who dares to disagree. But as the film progresses, Daniels
lets us see Bernard brought low, exiled to a shabby house several subway stops
away, constantly short of money, bitterly watching his wife emerge as a literary
star just as his own career is stalling.
But then, the entire cast is excellent: Laura Linney as mousy Joan, whose affairs
Bernard blames for ending the marriage; Jesse Eisenberg as Walt, an insecure
intellectual poseur who would rather parrot his father’s opinions on famous
novels than actually read them; and Owen Kline as Frank, who acts out his pain
in clandestine drinking and masturbating sessions. None of the characters come
out of the film looking good, and yet Baumbach observes them with such an empathetic
eye that their story seems tragic rather than simply petty and unpleasant. Besides
his co-writer credit on Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou,
Baumbach is best known for a pair of smart, unusually literate comedies about
neurotic Gen-Xers he did in the mid-’90s, Kicking and Screaming and Mr.
Jealousy. But in The Squid and the Whale, which won writing and directing awards
this year at Sundance, he displays a thrilling new level of emotional and cinematic
sophistication.
I spoke with Noah Baumbach last week over the phone from Brooklyn. Here are
the highlights of our conversation.
Vue Weekly: The film is so raw in its depiction of divorce; when you began conceiving
this film and working on the script, did you realize just how deeply into those
painful, uncomfortable family situations it was going to go?
Noah Baumbach: That’s a good question, because I never really thought
of the film in terms of what kind of reaction it would spawn. I did think about
wanting it to be intimate and open and honest, and in some ways to make it as
naked as possible.
VW: I understand that initially the film was going to be about two brothers
in their 30s whose parents get a divorce. What made you decide to lower their
ages?
NB: Well, I think I initially made the children in their 30s just because it
mirrored my own situation at the time—I was turning 30 and I was thinking
back on that time in my life when my parents split up. But I realized that it
was a barrier I was putting up, preventing me from getting deeper into the material.
VW: Did making the characters younger free you up in a way to make the film
less tied to your own experiences?
NB: No, actually, I think it made it more immediate—it put me right in
the moment. By putting myself in the head of an adolescent... I mean, by their
very nature, their thoughts are more confused and less articulate, and I think
that rubbed off on me as a writer and I started worrying less about controlling
things and instead began to let scenes take their course and not try to write
jokes and just let the kids tell me what the scene was about.
VW: The film captures the look of the mid-’80s so vividly. Are all those
buildings and those interiors still just lying around, or did a lot of careful
set dressing have to go into everything?
NB: We got lucky there, in that a friend of mine let us use a place he was renting
while his other place was being renovated. A lot of the other places we looked
at didn’t have the old appliances and fixtures, which we wouldn’t
have had the money to recreate, but this one did... I set the movie in 1986
because I wanted to put it in the timeframe of when I was an adolescent, but
once I got more deeply into the design element of the film, I realized how much
I loved the fact that it was just before the digital revolution—lots of
people were still listening to records, computers weren’t as common, there
was no e-mail.
VW: It’s great to see Jeff Daniels, who’s a really underrated actor,
get such a fantastic, showcase part in a movie. He usually plays such open,
friendly, guy-next-door types—where did the idea come from to cast him
as this bitter, prickly writer character?
NB: Well, I always knew I wanted someone who could be funny. But I didn’t
want a comic; I wanted a good actor who I knew would have a sense of humour.
I never wanted the part played comically, but at the same time, I knew there
needed to be an innately humourous quality to it. So one day I got a call that
said Jeff was really interested in the part and was going to fly to New York
to meet with me. And it was one of those things—the same thing happened
with Billy Baldwin as Ivan, the tennis pro—once you hear the idea, it
feels good, it feels right. And when I sat down with Jeff, the first thing he
said was how funny he thought the script was, which I liked. And I also just
liked how he would talk about the character. Plus, he has these really sad eyes,
and it struck me how he had all these qualities that in a different part could
seem so warm and affable and bearish, but which if he were playing Bernard could
seem more broken-down, like a giant collapsing.
VW: In some ways, Owen Kline has the most difficult role in the film, or at
least the character with the trickiest emotional terrain to navigate, especially
for an actor that young.
NB: In some ways, scenes [like the one where Frank masturbates in the stacks
of the school library] were the easiest ones to shoot because they’re
more technical; I could show him what I wanted him to do and talk him through
it off-camera while we were filming. But those scenes were also possible because
Owen is so mature in his understanding of the difference between himself and
Frank—he’s just such a great, sane, soulful kid. The more difficult
scenes were the ones like the family conference where Joan and Bernard tell
the kids they’re separating, where Owen would have to hit these emotional
notes right in the middle of the action—I mean, those scenes would have
been hard for Jeff or Laura. We had to shoot that scene a bunch of times and
he was so fine with it. Of course, it probably helps that Owen grew up around
actors [his parents are Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates]; it’s genetic in
some ways, but he’s got this sophisticated understanding of how actors
do it.
VW: Did the film change at all during the editing process? Maybe not in terms
of deleted scenes, but just in the tone of the piece or which characters the
viewers’ sympathies would gravitate to?
NB: What really developed in the editing was that I got much more comfortable
with having things go at a fast clip. Not necessarily within the body of scenes,
but not allowing the audience to rest as the movie’s happening. In the
script, there would be more stuff at the end of scenes like, “Walt sits
down and looks at the floor”—that kind of thing. But I took almost
all of that stuff out and let scenes almost overlap each other—I wanted
the film to be a real, visceral experience that you’d get propelled through,
and when it’s all over, it just ends abruptly and sort of spits you back
out into the world. That was the biggest change in the editing: I wasn’t
really thinking about audiences’ sympathies, but I did remove a lot of
those moments that would let you reflect on “What do I think about this
person?” V
The Squid and the Whale
Written and directed by Noah Baumbach • Starring Jeff Daniels, Laura
Linney, Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline • Opens Fri, Oct 28