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I’m going to begin by mentioning that I’m not a Wes Anderson fan. Obviously, I can’t refuse some of the more hilarious moments of Rushmore (especially by a brilliant Bill Murray), but from Bottle Rocket to The Royal Tenenbaums to the exceptionally lackluster Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, I feel that Wes Anderson is way too much Whit Stillman and not enough Woody Allen.

Yeah, yeah – Anderson only produces The Squid and the Whale while Life Aquatic co-writer Noah Baumbach takes over screenplay and directing duties – but I’ll be damned if The Squid and the Whale doesn’t play just like a Wes Anderson movie with a whopping helping of insecure adolescent pathos. We get the same kind of precious music choices (“Hey You” by Pink Floyd is exceptionally overused here) and a similar perspective on humankind (no one is perfect, everyone is heavily flawed, no one ever forgives anyone for anything). It’s an Anderson movie.

The film is based on Baumbach’s own life. We watch two brothers, Walt and Frank Berkman (Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline), whose parents are dueling writers, Bernard and Joan (Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney), trying to manage their careers while their marriage literally falls apart at the seams. But unlike his far more successful Kicking and Screaming, The Squid and the Whale has a shocking lapse of earnest expression. Baumbach’s dialogue is snappy and fresh and his characters are all exceptionally complicated, but this film has all the warmth and smartness of a David Mamet play; it’s all rhetorical dialogue bells and whistles and no subtext whatsoever.

My friend and fellow cineaste Ryan and I slogged through The Squid and the Whale trying to justify its presence on multiple 2005 top ten lists. It did take home a few Sundance prizes and even got a screenwriting Oscar nomination, but even though Ryan has a lot more affinity for Wes Anderson and Wes Anderson-like films, neither of us could penetrate it. The long and the short of it is that The Squid and the Whale is unique and smart, but I really don’t think it’s very good.

Complicated characters are fantastic, but I absolutely hated each and every denizen of Baumbach’s autobiographical world. Laura Linney’s philandering mother figure is hollow and stubborn. Jeff Daniels’ Bernard Berkman is the kind of competitive emotional robot who would provoke even the most slightly sensitive boy to cry like a girl. And both of the boys, caught in the emotional maelstrom of their parents’ divorce, are little hooligans who either express an exceptionally off-putting pomposity or wipe his semen all over books and school lockers (yeah – it’s that kind of American Beauty movie).

I don’t mean to say that there aren’t aspects of  Baumbach’s film to applaud. Daniels and Linney are virtually pitch-perfect in their roles as opposing ex-lovers, but I still found The Squid and the Whale to be as sniveling as it was savvy, as skin-deep as it is funny. Like Wes Anderson’s work, it has the pedigree of a full-fledged winner, but if an audience simply wanted to watch a pair of New York bohemians treat their asshole children with disdain and frustration, there are about a trillion reality-TV shows we could pop on instead.

Just because it has that glistening Sundance/Wes Anderson pedigree doesn’t mean that it has much to offer.

The Video: How Does The Disc Look?

Even for a low- budget feature, there’s an exceptional amount of grain on this 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer. You can tell from the start, when the Samuel Goldwyn logo comes on to the screen, that something is simply off, and the transfer never quite recovers from there. There’s a shocking amount of grain in the print (it’s unknown whether it’s purposeful or not). Black levels fluctuate wildly. Color saturation isn’t a huge issue. But finely grained detail definitely suffers. It’s a shame.

The Audio: How Does The Disc Sound?

The Dolby Digital 5.1 mix is more than adequate; it couples the film’s excellently-recorded dialogue with a nice array of effects and atmospherics and a competent placement of music cues. The mix is not very complicated or complex, but it utilizes surround tracks far more often than one might expect and with impressive fidelity, to boot.

Also included are a French Dolby Surround track, English and French subtitles, and English Closed Captions.

Supplements: What Goodies Are There?

The audio commentary is just as pretentious and by-the- book as the movie. Director Noah Baumbach complains that he doesn’t want to do a full screen-specific audio commentary because he doesn’t want people to have to watch the movie again (he certainly doesn’t like it when he’s forced to do that). Instead we get a 51-minute audio essay of sorts that places Baumbach’s voice over a sequence of stills from the movie (yeah, that’s a lot less boring than just watching the movie again). His thoughts are pretty thorough, but as Baumbach says, if there was anything more that could have been added to this very personal film, he would have put it in. For die-hards only.

The 37-minute conversation between author Phillip Lopate and Baumbach allows Baumbach to cover exactly the same material he dissects in his commentary. The only difference is that he has Lopate telling him how brilliant he is. Snore. The ten-minute featurette about the making of the film is slightly more revealing, but not by much (at least we get to hear Laura Linney and Jeff Daniels speak for themselves). Lastly, there is a load of trailers for: Capote, The Dying Gaul, It’s All Gone Pete Tong, Junebug, London, Pretty Persuasion, Saint Ralph, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, The Tenants, Thumsucker, and Where the Truth Lies.

Final Thoughts