In a dark corner of the Museum of Natural History in New York there is a diorama of a giant squid caught between the jaws of a whale. It is huge, vivid and quite alarming — two mighty beasts tussling, and never a victor. This is the spectacle which gives this film its curious title: as a young boy, Walt Berkman was taken to see it by his mother but he was too frightened to look, except through his fingers. At 16, he returns and gazes at it head-on.
We are in 1980s Brooklyn. The aforementioned Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) and his younger brother, 12-year-old Frank (Owen Kline), are pitched into a crisis when their parents announce their separation. Joan seems already to have mourned her marriage, but her husband Bernard (Jeff Daniels) is furious, and blames his wife. After all, she is the one who had the affair (a fact which seems to have made him envious as well as angry) and so he seizes possession of the moral high ground. While their parents wrangle over who gets custody of the cat at the weekend, Walt and Frank draw in their horns and tumble quietly off the rails. Walt mistreats his girlfriend and cheats in a school talent show; Frank drinks beer and fantasises about his mother’s sex life.
It is a painful subject, but an extremely funny film. Its director, Noah Baumbach, co-wrote Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (Wes Anderson is a producer on this film) and this has a similar feel — sorrowful, glad, touching, awkward, hilarious — but with none of the whimsy of The Royal Tenenbaums or The Life Aquatic. Family strife is at the heart of all Anderson’s films, and Baumbach takes over the subject with a quiet confidence and a similarly modest attitude.
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