Prickly relationships between fathers and sons, messy divorces and radical personal awakenings are the subjects tackled by Noah Baumbach’s “The Squid and the Whale,” which won top prizes at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and is generating Oscar buzz.
The title of Baumbach’s blistering, darkly comic film alludes to “The Clash of the Titans” diorama at Manhattan’s American Museum of Natural History.
But it also becomes a metaphor for the battle between a confused Jewish teenager and his hypercritical, intellectual father, played by Jeff Daniels. Initially, the fictional Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) acts as his father’s disciple, parroting his dad’s imperious dismissals of books such as “This Side of Paradise” as “minor Fitzgerald.” But after his parents’ divorce, traumatic events sour Walt’s father-worship.
The characters are inspired by Baumbach’s life with his parents, both lauded writers, in Brooklyn in the 1980s. Although his mother is Protestant, young Noah identified as Jewish because he felt a connection with the People of the Book. Family discussions abounded about “major” and “minor” Dickens, metafiction and why one should not bother to read Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.”
“On the one hand, it was incredibly valuable — and very Jewish — to be introduced to so many classics,” the 35-year-old director said in the lobby of the Le Mondrian Hotel in West Hollywood. “But on the other [hand], I was rejecting a lot of books I hadn’t even read, like the character of Walt in the movie. I dismissed ‘On the Road,’ as juvenile, when in fact I was a juvenile and probably should have had the experience of reading it.
“I was running around and pretending I was some brilliant person,” he added. “But I wasn’t doing well in school because I
wasn’t doing the work. It can be intimidating when you’re assigned to read a classic and you know it’s good for you but [difficult]. You feel like ‘What’s wrong with me’ and you bag off of it.”
When his parents divorced, suddenly the family he had viewed as superior collapsed, and he worried the neighbors would discover the Baumbachs weren’t so great.
Young Noah survived and grew up to collaborate with director Wes Anderson and to make three films — including 1995’s “Kicking and Screaming”— while still in his 20s. Yet he remained dissatisfied with these clever comedies of manners because he felt he was “writing from the outside in.” It was only psychotherapy and the maturity of reaching age 30 that allowed him to confront rawer subjects.
His thoughts turned to his adolescence, and he initially toyed with writing about two brothers in their 30s who deal retroactively with their parents’ divorce.
Then he saw Louis Malle’s “Murmur of the Heart,” which inspired him to focus on the children’s point of view.
He speaks softly except when describing the reviews that say “Squid” lambastes his real father, who was keenly aware of the movie project.
“I feel protected by the film because it is a fiction, an artistic achievement,” he said. “If I really was intending to eviscerate my father, I would feel much more vulnerable.”
Daniels noted similarities between Baumbach’s father and his character during a visit to the writer’s Brooklyn home.
“It was his enjoyment of finding a word and using it to describe something that only he would say,” Daniels said.
“He would use terms like, ‘fillet’ of the neighborhood, or how his beard was looking ‘a little feral.’ And then there would be a little flash of the eyes, looking at the person he just said that to, wondering if they’re as impressed with what he just did as he was.”
Baumbach, meanwhile, insists that his father loves the film — and that there is no squid and whale fight here. He said his dad is proud of his achievements. And so is the director of himself.
“I have learned the value of an emotional approach to filmmaking,” he said.