Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5903 in DVD
• Released on: 2006-08-07
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Dubbed, PAL
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: Spanish, Dutch, English, Hindi
• Dubbed in: Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 77 minutes

Amazon.co.uk review

The Squid and the Whale follows the divorce of Joan (Laura Linney, You Can Count on Me) and Bernard Berkman (Jeff Daniels, The Purple Rose of Cairo) as it wreaks havoc on the emotional lives of their two sons, Walt (Jesse Eisenberg, Roger Dodger) and Frank (Owen Kline, The Anniversary Party). Though there's no plot in the usual sense, the movie progresses with growing emotional force from the separation into the bitter fighting between Joan and Bernard and the hapless, floundering behaviour of Walt and Frank, who act out through plagiarism, sexual acts and drinking.

Some viewers may find the ending too diffuse; others will appreciate that writer/director Noah Baumbach (Mr. Jealousy) doesn't wrap up the messiness of life in a false cinematic package. Either way, viewers will appreciate how the specificity of the personalities makes The Squid and the Whale so compelling, as Baumbach has drawn the characters with such detail, both engaging and off-putting, that they leap off the screen. Naturally, he's greatly helped by the cast: Linney, Eisenberg, Kline and especially Daniels bite into these often unsympathetic portraits and give fearlessly honest performances, interlocked in both painful and funny ways--rarely have family dynamics been captured so vividly. If there was an ensemble Oscar, this cast would deserve it. --Bret Fetzer

Synopsis
Noah Baumbach's THE SQUID AND THE WHALE is an excruciatingly humane, often hilarious portrait of a disintegrating family in mid-1980s Brooklyn. Set in the stately yet off-kilter neighbourhood of Park Slope, the film tells the story of the Berkmans, a quintessentially New York family struggling to keep things together. Family patriarch Bernard (Jeff Daniels) is a published author and writing teacher whose insecurity over his own lack of recognition continues to plague him. Meanwhile his wife Joan (Laura Linney) is grappling with her own sense of unsettlement. Their sons, who are caught in the crossfire, express their confusion in different ways: 16-year-old Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) tries to pass off Pink Floyd's Hey You as his own hit in the school talent show, while his 12-year-old brother Frank (Owen Kline) begins to explore his budding sexuality. When Bernard and Joan finally decide to separate, the family must confront their unravelling situation head on. Rarely has family dysfunction been captured so frankly and honestly as in THE SQUID AND THE WHALE. Baumbach claims his film is only semi-autobiographical but, from the pitch-perfect writing and nostalgic tone, it feels as if we're watching home videos of the writer-director's past. Featuring an outstanding pop-music soundtrack (Bert Jansch, The Feelies, Lou Reed), the film boasts excellent performances from its cast.

Customer Reviews

Blows No Good
The Squid and the Whale is Noah Baumbach's autobiographical film about his parents' divorce. Beyond that I know nothing of the source material or of Baumbach's life - not even which of the two boys in the film represents him - but you don't need to, of course. And the truth of everything in the film beams through it so clearly that you would be in no doubt, anyway, that it came from real life.

Jeff Daniels gives a quietly barnstorming performance as Bernard (pronounced Ber-NARD) Berkman, a lazily bearded New York writer whose literary career is on the skids. His wife Joan (Laura Linney), meanwhile, has been published in the New Yorker and is about to get some good news about her first novel... Berkman is presented to us in toto in the opening scene, playing tennis with the family, the hilariously bitter competitive dad figure as he takes his son to one side and whispers "Try to get your mother's backhand. It's her weak point."

When the divorce is announced, along with joint custody ("Joint custody blows" - for some reason this has been changed on the UK DVD cover to 'joint custody sucks'), elder son Walt takes dad's side, accusing his mother of breaking up the family. He dates Sophie, a charming but unworldly girl who is taken in by his faux-intellectualism (another inheritance from his father), describing her favourite book as 'minor Fitzgerald,' bluffing a discussion and calling Metamorphosis 'Kafkaesque,' and faking authorship of Pink Floyd songs. Younger son Frank, aged - what? - ten or eleven, takes to masturbating and smearing his semen in public places, and to alcohol.

If all this makes it seem utterly grim, that could not be further from the truth. The film is not (or not only) uplifting in a Richard Yates way, for its honesty in portraying misery. It is bitterly brilliant, painfully funny, and with an almost non-stop series of great lines and scenes, mostly involving the self-involved Berkman Sr. One reviewer on imdb.com, who knew Jonathan Baumbach, the basis for Bernard Berkman, says that Daniels "amazingly, underplays the actual father."

Bernard: Joan, let me ask you something. All that work I did at the end of our marriage, making dinners, cleaning up, being more attentive. It never was going to make a difference, was it? You were leaving no matter what...

Joan: You never made a dinner.

Bernard: I made burgers that time you had pneumonia.

And the film is beautifully paced, too, with so many scenes cut short where other films would have played through until they became tiring or over-obvious. As a result, there is not a single boring moment in the entire film, which in fact comes in at well under 90 minutes.

It's quietly moving too, particularly in the central scene where son Walt explains to the psychotherapist that the only happy memory he can recall was when he was six years old, and doesn't involve his father. It also explains the title of the film, which comes back in the neat coda.

A vital film, and essential viewing.

A thoughful film for grown-ups
Sometimes painful often very funny I enjoyed this film with its witty dialogue and satirizing of academic pretensions about English literature criticism. So many US films are geared to the teen market, but this was a film for people who have experienced some of the vicissitudes of relationships and family life. The characters were sympathetically portrayed. Nothing was black and white: every character had good and bad points-just like real-life iteractions between people. All the acting was excellent, especially the two sons.
I wouldn't rate this as one of the greatest films ever made, but it was very well worth buying, and viewing again.

A Squid with teeth...
Yes indeed this squid really leaves its mark! This is one of the really rare cases where I fully agree with all those frothy critics who drooled over this jewel of a film. Whilst the interview on the extras part of this dvd might prompt you to doubt the coherence of the writer/director Noah Baumbach, don't be in any doubt - this is a real miniature masterpiece.
Whether you're into psychology or not, this puts you right in the centre of this family and all its problems, which are are too common today (as in the '80s, when the story takes place). There are so many special moments, that it would be misleading to select any one for mention.
Equally impossible would be to select any one person for special mention among the crew. All the actors are incredibly convincing, as is the script etc.
This is a MEMORABLE WORK OF ART.