The Squid and the Whale directed by Noah Baumbach, 20005, color, English, 81 minutes

By Donald H. Harrison

When the fictional teenager Walt Berkman was a younger child, his mother used to take him to the Museum of Natural History in New York City, where one exhibit depicts a giant squid wrapped around a whale in mortal combat.  It scared the child to see these two giants fighting.  Now, his fears were being made tangible by the real giants in his life, his parents.

If you have children and you are contemplating divorce, please see this movie first.  It may not save your marriage, but at least it may help you understand how traumatic the divorce, the competition for custody, and your efforts to find new companionship will be on your children.  Think of the movie as an R-rated primer.

Filmmaker Noah Baumbach drew on autobiographical details in telling how teenagers Walt and Frank Berkman  (Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline) shuttled between the homes of their  mother (Laura Linney)  and father (Jeff Daniels) after their break-up.  The boys learned to their disgust that their parents often were more interested in denying them to each other on "my days" than they were in actually being good role models. As their parents acted out, so too did the boys, with some pretty awful results.

Although this dysfunctional family is Jewish, nothing in the movie bears directly on this fact. The parents are too self-consumed to notice how difficult a time their children are having.  In their world of books, snobbery, and tennis, this highly assimilated  family has  no rabbi, youth group counselor, or other Jewish professional who can give the boys guidance. So they faced their topsy-turvy world on their own.  The miracle is that they survived it.