It's interesting that I saw "Bee Season" and "The Squid and the Whale" on the same day. Both depict four-member families
in crisis, with focus placed on each scholarly parent and precocious child almost equally. The films have very different styles, yet both are similarly disingenuous: "Bee Season" is all slick-looking faux-enlightenment; "Squid and the Whale" is indie-film vulgarity disguised as progressivism. The latter's ofttimes amusing audacity makes it the more enjoyable of the two, but neither film is as wise as it thinks it is. "The Squid and the Whale" is the work of Noah Baumbach (writer of "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou," director/writer of the 1995 cult favorite "Kicking and Screaming"), and it is the semi-autobiographical story of an intellectual Brooklyn couple splitting up in the mid-1980s. We open on a tennis court, where Bernard Berkman (Jeff Daniels), a renowned author and pompous literature professor, is teamed up with his 17-year-old son Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) in a game against his wife Joan (Laura Linney), herself a writer, and his younger son Frank (Owen Kline). We wonder if this is a metaphor for how the battle lines will be drawn in the divorce -- Dad and Walt vs. Mom and Frank -- but we don't wonder for long. Within minutes, the alliances indicated on the tennis court show themselves in daily life, too. Bernard and Joan's divorce is depicted as inevitable, the natural progression in the mid-'80s of couples who were married in the late '60s. Bernard is pretentious and full of himself, yet not as successful a novelist as he was 15 years ago. Joan has been habitually unfaithful, a fact that barely disturbs Bernard. These are progressive academic types, after all. Getting worked up over things like affairs, or punishing your children for swearing like sailors, or discouraging them from having sex -- that's all old-fashioned. Why, that's probably what Joan and Bernard's parents would have done to THEM! Heaven forbid.
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