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oah Baumbach's 1995 cult hit Kicking and Screaming spoke to a generation of "What do we do now?" post-collegians. His latest effort, The Squid and the Whale, about divorce in 1980s Park Slope, Brooklyn, calls out to thirtysomethings looking back on their childhood drama, eager to laugh about the pain. A keen, deftly crafted tale of family dysfunction, Squid escapes the self-aggrandisement typical of semi-autobiographic films. Comparisons to Wes Anderson (who co-produced Squid) and The Life Aquatic (which Baumbach co-wrote) are fair but limited. Baumbach's world is less goofy, more raw. He explores the emotional terrain of his characters with depth and nuance, choosing to enter, not flee, those moments of vulnerability that make you want to sink in your seat until the comedic fix washes the discomfort away.
    Jeff Daniels (who's never been better) plays patriarch Bernard, a writer and college professor emasculated by his wife's exploding career (she gets published in The New Yorker) and her choice of a lover (a tennis pro perfectly played by Billy Baldwin). Twelve-year-old Frank (newcomer Owen Kline) fields his confusion with explosions of expletives and the depositing of sperm in public places. Meanwhile, sixteen-year-old brother Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) throws around big words to give himself a sense of security in his changing world.
    The Squid and the Whale was a hit at Sundance this year, taking home both the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award and the Dramatic Directing Award — the

first film in the festival's history to nab both honors. Baumbach spoke with Nerve about fiction versus reality, good therapy, bad patterns and acting out in quiet ways. Oh, and he wants you to know: the masturbating kid is not based on his brother. — Harriette Yahr

How autobiographical is the film?
I always figure I should be better at answering that question. The film feels very separate from my real life and family. A lot has been changed and fictionalized. It's emotionally real.

Sometimes reality lacks resonance anyway. We fictionalize it to make it seem more real.
Exactly. If it weren't so effectively fictionalized, it wouldn't feel as real as it does. There's no way I could have made a movie that would have this effect if it were from my journal entries.

It's interesting how fiction enhances reality.
I think people who write kind of understand it. I certainly understand why people are interested in what's real and what isn't. But in a way, for the people who are writing it, it's only interesting as a way to get into the piece, not to demonstrate real stuff. Unless it's directly a memoir or something.

About some of the real stuff: Watching the custody-battle scene was the first time I could laugh about something that was so painful in my own life.
Yeah, there were things that were funny to me, even at the time. I dealt with stuff by making light of it. So I approached the movie thinking I was writing more of a comedy. It was actually a lot more serious and painful than I realized.

And divorce affects kids differently depending on their age. Walt is older, and I think he's going to be okay at the end of the film. But I'm a little concerned about young Frank.
Walt's too articulate for his own good. He can talk about all these things he doesn't know anything about. And poor Frank doesn't know how to process a lot of this stuff. There's enough complicated stuff going on when you're a kid anyway, besides having your family broken up. And that was something I thought about a lot — how to show Frank's inarticulate but emotional and confusing loneliness, and how he acts out in ways that are quieter. They're not so quiet when you see them, but they're quieter in terms of nobody in the family seeing it. But I absolutely agree. I remember thinking, Oh, it's good that I'm older and I can handle the divorce. But, in a way, I think I may have handled it too well. It probably wasn't until I made this film that I was able to get stuff out that I never acknowledged I was angry about.

So the film was cathartic for you?
More from a creative perspective. I feel like this is the movie I always wanted to make, even though I never knew I wanted to make it. I'm excited about how I want to make movies now.

How have things changed?
Well, I never grew up thinking I was as interested in making movies that were this real. I grew up around a lot of people who valued post-modernism in literature and in movies. And I've figured out, not that I don't value that stuff, but it's not necessarily my honest reaction to things.

But you're not a philistine.
[laughs] Well, I've been a philistine.

Which brings us to the jock versus the intellectual. Joan, the mother, chooses a tennis player over an academic. Do you think intellectuals get stuck in their heads when it comes to matters of love?
Well, I don't have a feeling about intellectuals as a whole, but the people I know and tend to be attracted to are people who are articulate. It's interesting, with people who are highly articulate and smart, there's a kind of assumption, even on their part — but certainly from your part if you're talking to them — that their emotional life isn't sophisticated. And often that's not the case. I find that funny, and interesting — characters who are like emotional cripples but can talk the whole day away.

Back to Frank's acting out, and his sexuality. He's twelve; he grows up fast to me. And it seems his masturbatory experiments in school are linked to the emotional void he feels at home.
Intimacy, and what's public and private, are things I was thinking about on various levels in this movie. Particularly the idea that, with divorce, a family's private life automatically becomes public. For kids, suddenly you're revealing that things are not great at home. You're letting everyone in on stuff that you may have been kept secret. So, for Frank, [masturbating] is a very private act, but at the same time he's also trying present to the world that it's okay.

Walt does it with words. He's so afraid of revealing himself that he falls back on a pattern that has been authenticated by his father. Or by Pink Floyd. Frank is doing it with his bodily fluids and with his drinking. It's a way to put himself out of control.

I always want to make sure I establish that my brother did not do these things. I certainly wouldn't have put them in the movie if he did. But I'm interested in movies that show things not for shock value. People have asked me, Did you ever think of not showing it [the masturbation]? I never considered not doing it. I just thought, Why not show it? I'm interested in seeing that kind of intimacy in movies.

Frank's sexual exploration is also a wonderful vehicle for family interaction.
Oh, definitely. Somebody said to me that books are used as power in the film — Bernard claims his books, they fight over the books. And then they actually took it to the point of Frank's smearing of semen on the books, which I never thought of.

When Walt dumps his girlfriend, she retaliates by claiming that her parents said he wouldn't have made a good boyfriend anyway, because his parents are so messed up, they're bad role models. Do you think people who come from divorced families are doomed to have troubled relationships?
I hope not. [laughs] No. You could also argue that they've gone through it and they've learned from it.

But what shows up in the film is that we never really escape the dynamics of our family. We mirror them in our relationships.
I think that's what good therapy is about — acknowledging those things and, in the less healthy parts of them, discovering and being able to see those things and get less sort of enjoyment out of them.

So they have less weight for us.
Yeah, the Freudian idea that everyone is going to marry their mother. But the healthiest people marry people who are sufficiently like them but different enough. I have friends who keep getting involved in the same kind of relationship dynamics. They complain about them, but they obviously keep seeking them out because they're familiar. And until they stop getting some pleasure — perverse as it may be — out of that dynamic, they're going to keep making the same mistakes.

I had a therapist who called those patterns "well-traveled familiar pathways."
Exactly. We all do this. Some people do it more than others. You find yourself in situations in which you really are unhappy, but you're compelled to keep doing it. Walt has some idea of himself that isn't necessarily how he is. Which all of the characters in the movie do, to some degree.

When Walt finds out his mom slept with his friend's dad, he pushes that thought away. Kids don't want to know about their parents' sexuality.
At the same time, I think there's a fascination with it. Kids know that's how they came to be. They don't want to think about it, but they're always wondering what goes on behind closed doors. Their parents go to their bedroom and they shut the doors, and you go to your bedroom and then you regroup in the morning. [laughs] You never want to actually think of your parents having sex, but I think the older you get, it becomes more important to try and put pieces together, like, what was going on?

The parents' affairs rock the foundation for their children. When boundaries are crossed — in the sense that it's not just the mother and father anymore, that there are these other people involved in the parents' sex lives — it has a significant effect on Walt and Frank's sense of security, on what's keeping the family together.
It's like polluting the family. I was fourteen when my parents broke up. That's why I made Walt sixteen. I wanted him to be dealing with women in a more mature way — immature in terms of the scheme of an adult life, but more mature for a kid. Right on the precipice of entering this new area of life.

How did that Mother and the Whore poster find its way onto the wall of Walt's room in Bernard's house?
What's funny about that is that in the script it was Blow Up, which passes no judgment on anything, except maybe you could say that things had blown up. But I hadn't thought of that consciously. Warner Brothers wanted to charge us, like, three grand for the poster, which we weren't going to pay. New Yorker Films allows you to have their posters for free, so I went through them and picked The Mother and the Whore, honestly not thinking about its significance. I picked it because it's a movie I like but it's also obscure in a way that Bernard would be into.

It seems to underscore Bernard's challenges with women.
Well, sometimes stuff you didn't deliberately mean takes on significance.

These parents may be flawed, but they're doing the best they can.
I'm not sure if I believe this, but I think it might be harder when parents are more articulate, because their form of communication is highly verbal. Maybe it's easier for parents who act more on emotion and instinct: they might be fucked up in their way but are very loving.

So they'd be more emotionally available?
Maybe. I don't know. I do think the parents are loving in The Squid and the Whale, in their way. I think there is just so much other crap in there. They really do care about these kids and want them to turn out okay.

But Bernard has a problem showing up. He insists on having his kids over for the night, but goes out to the movies without them. It's just important that he gets his night.
Exactly. It just becomes a list to check off. And that's the thing with divorce. There's so much crap that accompanies this idea of parity: I'll get sneakers and winter coats, you'll get tennis and summer camp. It's like there's the legal separation — and then there's everything else. n°