Director Noah Baumbach's award-winning account of his parents' divorce and his own confused adolescence is his first film in 10 years and, he tells John Patterson, his first 'real' movie
When Noah Baumbach's autobiographical new movie, The Squid and the Whale, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last year and won him awards for best screenplay and best director, the director afterwards felt moved to call it "my first 'real' movie". Which was odd, because in fact it's his third feature as a writer-director, after his post-college comedy, Kicking and Screaming, and his oddball romantic comedy, Mr Jealousy. It's just that those movies were made 11 and nine years ago respectively, and we've heard little from him since, apart from his collaboration with Wes Anderson on the script of The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and his marriage late last year to his companion of four years, actress Jennifer Jason Leigh.
But The Squid and the Whale might indeed be his first "real" movie. Certainly it has garnered more attention and critical approval - including a best screenplay Oscar nomination - than his work as a fledgling director back when the terms "generation X" and "indie cinema" were still freshly minted, and the two phenomena seemed so deftly intertwined in Baumbach's fresh, mordant, talkative comedies about rootless and dissatisfied young intellectuals.
This time around, after a frustrating decade of unsold scripts and aborted projects, he has reached back to his own teenage years in mid-1980s Brooklyn to dissect his own family at the time of his parents' divorce. Baumbach's parents are novelist Jonathan Baumbach and former Village Voice film critic and novelist Georgia Brown, classic New York intellectuals, and The Squid and the Whale is a witty, emotionally pungent and brutally honest account of Baumbach's experience of joint custody between his parents' warring households.
In person, Baumbach looks like he belongs somewhere on a sliding scale between the soulful, sweet-faced Adrien Brody (though he's shorter and lacks that splendid nose) and Jason Schwartzman without the five o'clock shadow. At 35, though, he still looks disarmingly young as he speaks lucidly about his career and life, and that 10-year hiatus from directing.
"I had two movies that I sort of did [he put a pseudonym on the misfiring comedy, Highball], an adaptation that didn't get made, things that just didn't happen, and another script that I just could never get right," he says. "In retrospect it all seems like a set of transition scripts that got me to writing this one. I think it was a good thing, looking back, because it helped me find this script and subsequently discover how I wanted to make movies - as an adult."
And as an adult, he discovered by accident that he wanted to make a movie about childhood and adolescence after seeing Louis Malle's Murmur of the Heart, in which sexually and intellectually precocious teenage brothers fumble their way into adulthood (one of them by sleeping with his own mother).
"When I saw it, I had been working on a script about people in their 30s looking back at their childhoods. What I liked about the Malle movie was that it was very open and free - and disturbing also - but had an almost deceptively loose, untidy feeling about childhood. So I thought I should write about the kids themselves."
The result, The Squid and the Whale, easily the strongest and most perceptive movie Baumbach has yet made, is anchored by the performances of Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney as the fictionalised Bernard and Joan Berkman. While Joan is a fond, smart, well-adjusted mother, Bernard is a hugely egocentric, arrogant and self-absorbed father, always convinced of his own rectitude and fine taste in literature and film, forever berating his sons to read more difficult and challenging books and force-feeding them Godard and Jean Eustache movies (the funniest joke in the movie is that a 16-year-old boy would have a poster for Eustache's The Mother and the Whore on his bedroom wall). Bernard barges through life, sleeping with a girl his son covets, insulting everyone and always stunningly clueless - or simply not caring - about the feelings of others.
IT IS A brutally unsympathetic portrait, and Baumbach is pleased that Daniels never tried to make Bernard more likable.
"Jeff's not at all like Bernard, or a part of his milieu," he says. "He still lives in Michigan, married his high-school sweetheart, and runs his own small playhouse - he's from regular America. The narcissistic quality of Bernard is scary for people to play and other actors might have wanted to somehow redeem him. But I always insisted he just remains exactly who he is - doesn't change one bit at the end - and that was never even a conversation Jeff and I ever had. He never asked, 'am I too much of a jerk?', he just didn't care."
Were his parents nervous about his burgeoning project?
"My parents were actually encouraging," Baumbach says. "I didn't tell them too much, except that I was dealing with this time, and I'm sure they were sort of . . . cautiously interested. They've both written about their own parents. They knew this was a path I was going to go down myself, and I didn't want them affecting it. I didn't watch a lot of movies, I didn't want a lot of outside influences intruding. As much as possible I wanted to connect directly with this time, with my life and the character's life."
The lack of movie influences is a plus, and the movie is deliberately anti-stylistic and rough in its grain and textures, permitting the drama and the characters to speak directly to us, unfiltered and emotionally raw.
In the foreground are the kids, Walt and Frank (Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline), aged 16 and 13. While mother's boy Frank conducts odd experiments with alcohol and masturbation, Jesse - Baumbach's brainy but immature alter-ego - sides with his father and is grievously rude to his mother (he earns a slap from Linney that may have you cheering). At a school talent show he sings Pink Floyd's Hey You and blithely passes it off as his own because "I feel like I could quite easily have written it myself".
This prompts a clueless Bernard to congratulate him with his signature lordly certainty: "You'll win, and if you don't win, there's something wrong with them, which is probably the case anyway."
For a movie that references a dozen complex and challenging 1960s and 1970s arthouse classics, The Squid and the Whale assiduously avoids stylistic quotation from older movies. Was this a reaction to his parents' intellectual tastes?
"Well, the references are there because they were the references of those characters," Baumbach says. "Bernard obviously likes more 'meta' stuff, more analytic and intellectual - Godard over Truffaut, for instance, or Antonioni over Fellini. He thinks he's right a lot of the time. But what I discovered about myself in writing and making the movie was that the kind of movies I want to make are less like that, and more open and emotional. I suppose that was - and it was unconscious at the time - the biggest reaction against my parents. Not that they didn't love lots of very visceral movies and books - it wasn't all about Thomas Pynchon - but I did grow up with the idea that the better stuff was dryer, more cerebral - and I threw that out on this movie. My film is emotional rather than meta, and that's my rebellion."
RETURNING FINALLY TO the far side of that 10-year hiatus, I ask if he was perhaps too young to be directing when he made Kicking and Screaming. It seems as though he had to pay all his dues after his first movie, instead of before.
"It's probably true," Baumbach says. "I just saw it again with the cast and a Q&A session afterwards. All the stuff that bothers me about it, that I feel critical of now, is balanced by all the young-man stuff. There's a kind of openness in that movie that's really nice. Watching it again - and I couldn't watch all of it - I was sort of cringing and impressed at the same time that this version ofme 11 years ago had done this.
"I wanted to write and direct movies from a very young age. Then I was actually doing it at a very young age, 25, and I think the long gap that we mentioned was sort of me growing up as a person. I figured out in that time that if you want to make more personal movies - and it's very hard in Hollywood, where there's all this pressure to define what genre it is, and sum it all up in a pitch - you have to let the movie become what it becomes.
"I try to trust that instinct more and more now, and it's not that easy."
The Squid and the Whale is now showing