In a sense, Noah Baumbach has done little more in his entire career than to circle around his own biography, by insistently returning from time to time to the zero moment that is his parents’ divorce, which took place sometimes in the ’80s. Seen from this angle, The Squid and the Whale is the directorial effort that brought him closest to a direct confrontation with his own memories, seeing as the small details which anchor the film in a certain time and space – the plot is set in 1986 in the Park Slope neighborhood, where Baumbach used to live – are meant as some sort of hint. A story must be lived in order to be imagined, as Godard said at one point. For a filmmaker such as Baumbach, whose imagination grinds to a halt whenever it tries to overcome the steep hurdle that would take him beyond the tepid tropes of mumblecore – that is, petty intellectualism peppered with references, or cozy New York alleys that can be inscribed with the most terrible turmoils of the heart, a breezy tonality which makes the film seem to work out just as fine in an arthouse festival as it does on Netflix – Godard’s idea seems as appropriate as possible.

After all, it’s not Baumbach’s fault that we have recently witnessed an avalanche of smaller films, keen on praising their own modest technical means, that portray the lives of some washed-out creatives who find themselves captive at the very gentrified heart of New York. I’d say that Baumbach is sowing the terrain for a filmmaker, otherwise much more interesting, such as Alex Ross Perry – who, in Listen Up Philip, took a writer (and it could be that Bernard Berkman, the protagonist of The Squid and the Whale, was one of this character’s vague predecessors) and endowed him with every possible form of rudeness, cynicism, and contempt towards the human species. There’s something exasperating about the second-hand Woody Allen-esque air that these family dramedies imagined by Baumbach exude at every step – as if the author, knowing that he’s riding on the coattails of a towering figure, is afraid to stray away too much from the norm, thus taming even the things that Allen exposed bitingly. The Squid and the Whale opens up a loop (that is especially thematic in nature) that will only be closed with Marriage Story, 15 years later. Meanwhile, its shots have lost some of their handcrafted casualness, the junctions between shots have become smoother, the sincerity of its point of view has thinned out, the plot started to explore in a more rigorous manner the inexplicable process through which two people who used to love each other are now at war. And obviously, due to all of the above reasons and then some more, I prefer the earlier film.

In The Squid and the Whale, the pressure cooker that lies underneath each and every marriage has started to boil over, but the strength of the film lies in the fact that it precisely underlines the impression that each of the parts does their best not to let everything turn into a disaster – which is what we will see in Marriage Story. We can guess the complicated intrigues that are lurking around beyond the surface of the anticipated feeling of rupture, which we then analyze shot by shot – but on screen, all of these things are padded and sweetened by a little piece of music or a small joke. And what a magnificent breeze sways throughout the film due to Jesse Eisenberg’s performance as a schoolkid who is just about to turn eighteen, who is forced to renegotiate his first love story just as his family starts to come apart. What is especially touching is the sensation, which Eisenberg voluptuously conveys, that his character, Walt, seems to know everything, as if he’d been bestowed with the inalienable right to lecture everyone around him. He quickly retorts to his future girlfriend the fact that This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s debut novel, which she had enjoyed, is in fact a minor work, and then pursuing this with a list of other Fitzgeraldian titles that are more worthy of attention. Why is this short scene – in which Baumbach seems to do little more than to mix in some oh-so-familiar American indie film snobbishness – so touching? It’s because, while we can wholeheartedly admit that Walt is right – This Side of Paradise really doesn’t show everything that Fitzgerald is capable of –, we can reasonably doubt that he has read the works which he cites; rather, he seems to simply parrot away something that he has caught on from his father, who doesn’t shy away from self-praise (“Kafka, my predecessor…”) and from harsh value judgments. And what can be more disheartening than to see this deer-eyed and slightly hunchbacked, yet ridiculously uptight young man as he’s categorically judging the conflict in the favor of his dad, although he mostly seems to choose his side in virtue of a cultural capital that might very well not exist beyond the walls of their own illusions?

It’s otherwise quite clear that Baumbach spends more time on the figure of the father than on the mother’s, ex-wife Joan (Laura Linnery, admirable in her complete lack of make-up): his portrait is better-sketched and more complex. We don’t really know what Joan is up to – it seems that, in a completely unbothered fashion, she is meeting up with several men –, other than from disparate pieces of information that are gathered by Bernard and his two children; as such, her motivations remain somewhat murky and are quickly sanctioned by the protagonist, and once something truly significant happens in her life – such as an article published in The New Yorker, for example –, that something ultimately still ricochets in the decomposing figure of Bernard, who is having a rough time, professionally. I don’t know if this lack in balance can be attributed squarely to Bernard – because the film itself doesn’t give any hint of impartiality, or omniscience, and that’s a good thing. After all, in such cases, the truth always lies somewhere in the middle, and the middle is something unattainable. It’s just a shame that Baumbach seems less interested in working with bits of truth, rather than fitting them into an already-worn puzzle.

The Squid and the Whale is available on Netflix.

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.