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Noah Baumbach was born into a family of high-ranking intellectuals in Brooklyn, New York, to a novelist father whose parents had written commentaries for Village Voice weekly and Partisan Review, and they divorced when Baumbach was young. His older brother, Nick Baumbach, who grew up with Noah, now teaches film at Columbia University. Noah Baumbach first entered the film industry as a screenwriter, co-writing The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) and Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) with good friend Wes Anderson, and his own film work is mostly self-written and self-directed.
"The Squid and the Whale," released in 2005, can be said to be based on Noah's real upbringing with his brother. He himself confessed in a film interview: "In a sense, all the films I direct are about my childhood experiences, whether the stories I shoot are my childhood or not." ”
Noah Baumbach
The film mainly tells the story of a middle-class family of four living in Brooklyn. Similar to Noah's real life, the parents in the film are both writers and have two sons in the family. The conflict intensified with the parents' affair and quarrel, and the two children had to face the fact that their parents divorced and separated. In this family of intellectuals, even the occurrence and development of contradictions appear to be quite literary and symbolic. The paradoxical combination between husband and wife, parents and children, and the growth and change of the four people have always shown an atmosphere of stalemate and compromise in parallel.
Stills from Squid and Whales
When the subtitles of "Squid and Whale" have not disappeared in the title, the film uses the dialogue between the four protagonists as a voiceover, directly cutting into the plot. This is a scene when a family of four plays tennis - the film shows the audience a fragmentary scene of intertwined invasion in an angry and urgent rhythm, directly expressing the protagonist's inner monologue with action, the dependence and competition between the four people are first revealed, and the unhappiness at the beginning of the film is the epitome of the contradiction of the whole movie.
Arguably, this is a true New York film, with incredibly humorous fragments of memories of family breakdowns, as well as a bit of a movie from before the enactment of the Hollywood Production Act in the 1930s. The name "Squid and Whale" is not clear at first glance, and even during the viewing process, it is difficult for the audience to directly associate the name with the plot of the film. As Baumbach's third feature film, "Squid and Whales" may have paid little attention to the title of the film, but still focused on the description of urban life in New York. Whether it's walking through the black iron fence in front of a house near brooklyn Park and Dismay Park, driving in a nearby neighborhood in anger to find a parking space, dragging your way to a dark, desk-equipped living room for a family meeting, or climbing the sloping wooden staircase to hide in the bedroom for a while, each scene is built on a solid visual foundation, encompassed by a linear compositional compositional composition of shallow space. While watching the film, you can also inadvertently catch a glimpse of some interesting details in the film, such as the inferior poster of "Mother and Prostitute" that his father pasted on the wall of his miserable new house.
The rhythm and structure of the whole film are perfectly combined with the growth of the two little male protagonists and the growth of the parents, as if they naturally grew out of the emotional changes of the protagonists. The eldest son, who admired his father, mentioned at the dinner table that he had been assigned to read A Tale of Two Cities at school, while his father, a literature teacher, unexpectedly relegated the book to Dickens's not-so-good work, and then criticized it, prompting the neglected mother to interject that the eldest son should make his own judgment after reading it, which caused more controversy at the dinner table. Every scene involving multiple people has this breathless tension, and everything happens so fast that the two children can't understand and accept it.
Stills from Squid and Whale, young son and mother
The two adults in the film, father and mother, show extraordinary reality and candor. In order to get rid of the pain in front of them, they are always desperate to fight for a situation that is good for themselves - this is also the novelty of the film. The mother's way of speaking was always very concerned and gentle (but some of the nagging made people impatient to listen), and the content of her conversation was open, even a little too open. The father on the defensive, on the other hand, uses his authority as an adult to make the eldest son an ideal listener, and his "encouragement" is almost always plunged into despotism, instilling a ridiculous and precocious sense of intellectual superiority in a fragile adolescent boy. For my father, the most painful moment was when he stopped talking and had to be alone with himself.
Stills from Squid and Whale, eldest son and father
At first, the image of Jeff Daniels was considered less suitable for the role of father. Because on the big screen, he has always been known for the sunshine comedy male protagonist and the fringe image in "Dumb and Agua". However, the father figure in "Squid and Whale" on the one hand helped Daniels to complete a great breakthrough in the screen image, and on the contrary, it had to be admitted that it was Daniels who gave the father an unusual dimension, a natural self-defense mechanism, and at the same time had the courage to delve into the character's uncomfortable rudeness and the deep frustration of not being a great writer.
Laura Linny's mother is a completely different story. In the film, she cleverly shows her regained freedom in front of her children and her separated husband. This is more reflected in her movements and psychological doubts than in what she said, and the attitude towards his sons' adolescent anxieties. Her performance is more stealthy and calm than Daniels's father, but just as impressive.
When the film was released in 2005, the two sons in the show, the eldest son played by Jesse Eisenberg and the younger son played by Owen Kline, were undoubtedly the biggest highlights of the film: the children of New York intellectuals, sensitive on the outside and vulnerable on the inside, who were in a multidimensional dilemma in their lives. Today, 11 years later, these actors and the roles they play are more spicy, profound, and valuable. Baumbach's film has been praised proportionately, and has this particular achievement of his original use of these two actors been recognized?
The eldest son and the youngest son in Squid and Whale
These two children are not Salinger's watchmen in the wheat field, nor are they the former in The Great Citizen, nor are they the children in Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums (2011). They are down-to-earth middle-class children who love to read, but they are far from being well-behaved babies who are perfectly protected in the ivory tower. They are more akin to those of New Yorkers who live in a world full of asphalt, grocery stores, and subways, like Charlie in Mean Streets (1973) or the African-American siblings in John Kasowitz's Shadow.
The eldest son has a frank gaze, a sharp expression, a clumsy movement, and of course his appearance – which has been unanimously recognized by the audience over the past decade. In the meantime, Eisenberg's way of acting was also tweaked by David Finch in The Social Network to a more gloomy tone. But Eisenberg's other characters have never been more heartbreaking than in Squid and Whale, whether it's his adoration of his father, his condemnation of his mother, or the most melancholy rejection of the girl who loves him passionately.
The younger son seems to be the least important of the four main characters, probably because he is the youngest and has the fewest shots, but his role cannot be ignored either. He was four years younger than his brother, but he was smarter, tougher, and not old enough to be anxious and confused. He was a child with a fever and a headache and was not cared for by his father, and in order to go to the nearest store to buy some Tylenol to relieve the pain, he walked helplessly through several streets alone with a little change... In recent years, there have hardly been any more melancholy and moving characters like him in American films.
Most films about family are actually just more like depicting the difficult process of self-knowledge of individuals. Theoretically, Squid and Whale is no different. The quick scene switching and powerful emotional impact that you will miss in the blink of an eye when watching the movie are actually interlocked, echoing back and forth, which is endlessly evocative. The balance of emotions is constantly switching, like four people sitting in a nuclear boat carrying three people, so everyone must rotate positions to maintain balance, and each role takes the core position, sometimes as a foil, sometimes irrelevant. In this 81-minute film full of "flammable and explosive" conflict, each character becomes the protagonist at certain moments: for the father, it is a close-up of the occasional flash of painful self-knowledge; for the younger son, it is smearing semen on a row of books in the library, or finding herself alone in the father's house for several days; for the mother, it is this more frequent impression that seems to be fully aware of the direction of the plot, as if she is an audience member, not just the person in the play.
As mentioned earlier, the title "Squid and Whales" seems to be unintelligible. It may be a metaphor for the father and mother in the film, where the little squid is always cleverly avoided when it is in danger of being swallowed alive by whales, but in fact, in this duel, the four main characters in the film also take turns to play the roles of squid or whale. Everyone is at the same time a hell or refuge for others. That's why the ending of the movie gives the audience a blow to the heart.
At the end of the film, the eldest son walks into the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, slowly advancing with the sound of the cello in the background music, into the Milstein Marine Life Hall, standing in front of the huge model of the squid and whale fighting that has brought him the shadow of his childhood, which is more meaningful than the earlier film's older son's symbolic journey into the adult world. At this moment he stepped outside the plot, he didn't care about his broken home in Brooklyn, he discovered this beautiful and chaotic vast universe.
This is an authentic New York film made by an authentic New Yorker, allowing the human body to experience real New York life on all levels. Every year, there are countless movies filming New York, and then misreading New York, they just think of the city as a landmark, a background board that is easy to identify. The way the characters in Squid and Whales relate to their surroundings, the rhythm of their speech, the toy-like little houses, and Brooklyn decorated with low bushes — all of the scenes seem incredibly real in 2005 and even today. Baumbach's aesthetic, rooted in pure instinct in this film, appears more localized, and is a huge leap forward from his debut film Twenty Years of Madness a decade ago.
I still remember how I felt after watching Squid and Whale in 2005, and despite the joy and sadness in the film, the dominant emotion was anger, especially the anger of the film director about his parents' divorce. Looking back at the film today, I can still feel this anger, but it is also intertwined with a strong love for parents who are independent individuals, for brothers, for a city, for a memory of the past.
To show it all, Baumbach noticed the tiniest expressions of sadness and the slowest tears that remained. It's definitely a very interesting movie and an entertaining movie. Many of the scenes in the film became the most popular movie clips on YouTube. Emotions always come and go, whether it is painful adolescent confusion or those awkward opportunistic tricks, or the humiliation of others by unintentional evil words and evil deeds, each character is carefully designed and cleverly placed in this storm of interpersonal relationships.
Baumbach's other work, the black-and-white comedy Frances Ha, focuses on a single protagonist, a 27-year-old ordinary American chick with modern dance dreams. Greta Gerweger can be called his "muse", always playing in his films some clumsy and cute woman who makes people laugh and feel sad when watching movies.
Francis Ha borrowed the soundtrack from several New Wave films and was stylistically considered to have a taste of French New Wave cinema. The film also trivially presents the audience with a bland and unwilling New York life intertwined with a series of issues such as friendship, love, dreams and self-knowledge. What is even more rare is that the audience always seems to be able to find some of their own shadow in this film.
It is said that once Baumbach has made a good achievement, someone will shout in unison to call him "Woody Allen's successor". Also focusing most of the film's perspective on New York, also about the crisis of middle-class life, Baumbach's way of telling is not as brisk as Woody's, nor does it focus on philosophical speculative lines, but more realistic, close to the ground to write the story. The style of the two films is similar, but the tone is different, so this "successor" argument is obviously too flippant.
"At the age of thirty, I had a crisis," Baumbach said in an interview, "and I thought, in general, I wanted to make more films about emotions, more films that seemed maybe not so smart." "As an artist, Baumbach is walking down this path of his choice with his unique film style.
reference:
https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/4320-the-squid-and-the-whale-4-way-street
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