The Squid And The Whale
If there was ever a token knee-jerk indie movie, this could be it. This or Garden State.
Plot:
Two young men growing up faces the hardships of a parent break up.
Review:
The Squid and the Whale is both a tragic and comical look at what a divorce does to a family in New york in the 1980's. Jeff Daniels plays the character of dad, a pompous and somewhat arrogant writer whose feelings brought on by commercial failure (when all fails - teach literature at university) cause him to meet everyone with intellectual superiority. Daniels role is quite humorous. He's exactly the kind of guy that would have no problem being socially awkward at your dinner party where only two of eighteen people had even met before. He overanalyzes and will stop at nothing to get everyone else to match his own opinions.
Laura Linney plays the the mom and she does it quite well. This is a different kind of character than Daniels and it almost makes you wonder why they ever got married. She however gets the blame for the divorce since she was the one having the affair which in turn makes raising her kids difficult seeing as she lost her entitlement as moral authority.
Caught in the middle of this mess are the two young men. They join the different "sides" of the divorce, the oldest aligning with dad and the youngest with the mom. The oldest son is quite intolerable to watch due to how much of a replica of his dad he is the younger one however is quite the 21:st century metrosexual in making.
Caught in the middle of this mess are the two young men. They join the different "sides" of the divorce, the oldest aligning with dad and the youngest with the mom. The oldest son is quite intolerable to watch due to how much of a replica of his dad he is the younger one however is quite the 21:st century metrosexual in making.
If its one thing that I liked about this movie it is the level of uneventfullness. Being a human being in the post-mtv generation where directors and producers cant stay on one frame for more than 3 seconds I find long takes glorious. I also find the old relic thinking of "building up to something" very pleasant. To be completely honest there is not a single scene in this movie that I find extremely memerable. This is a slow, uneventful and bland one and a half hour and I think its great.
Trailer:
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