The Squid And The Whale

Yeah. From the mouths of babes. (Shudder.) Before we get to the foulest mouthed kid this side of Six Pack, let’s hit a preview.

INNOCENT VOICES—This is a film from Mexico about an El Salvador boy and his mother who are separated during their civil war in the 80s. Now, since it’s in Spanish, there is no real dialogue in the preview, so it was kind of hard to get a handle on the story, but it looks like a pretty heartwrenching film. For some reason I never end up seeing these movies in the theatre. Well, in fact, I rarely end up seeing them on video, either, because I just kind of forget about them. But that shouldn’t stop you! Go see this film. It looks really, really good.

But enough of that. Let’s get to something a little more lighthearted…like divorce.

Frank and Walt Berkman (Owen Kline and Jesse Eisenberg) are two fairly normal kids in mid-80s NYC. Their parents, though, are about to change all that.

Bernard (Jeff Daniels) is a writer who hasn’t published anything in a while. His wife, Joan (Laura Linney) is an aspiring writer who is close to getting a publisher. But their marriage is falling apart very quickly. When they finally decide to divorce, things explode in quiet, but unsubtle ways. Frank, the younger son, starts cursing like a sailor and jerking off in pretty inopportune places and, um, spreading his seed around the school. Walt gets a girlfriend, but he starts to be a pretentious asshole much like his dad. Bernard moves into a run down house on the other side of the park and insists that the kids spend exactly half of their time with him.

The whole movie is basically a fight between the parents over the kids and their past lives while the kids are fighting for their own identities and sanity. It’s probably one of the most honest portrayals of a divorce put on film in a long, long time. This isn’t a Liar, Liar type of divorce where there’s always that chance of the parents getting back together. These people really seem to hate each other even if there are flashes of unwanted love mixed in. The kids are constantly back and forth on their feelings about their parents. (“Mom? You had an affair? Dad? You’re a complete prick?”) They love both of them, but they hate both of them for putting them through all of this hell.

Walt starts a relationship with his first girlfriend, Sophie (Halley Feiffer), but is he having more feelings for his dad’s student, Lili (Anna Paquin), who just moved in with him? And how ‘bout that song that he says he wrote? Sounds pretty familiar, huh?

But it’s Frank that is the truly tragic figure here. His sanity just kind of keeps going south. Not even his beloved tennis couch (William Baldwin) is much of a refuge.

All of the acting is great here. Just about all of the characters are sympathetic in some way without being particularly good people. (It’s especially hard to identify with Bernard, but there’s even a little bit of humanity in him at times.) The kids are pretty gutsy with their harsh portrayals of loss and confused love. They’re constantly at odds with each other, but they’re all they have to hang on to. And, somewhere deep down, they know that. (I will have to say, though, that there were times that I thought Jesse was doing a Woody Allen impression. He’s still very good, though.)

This movie is very hard to watch, especially if you went through a divorce as a kid. (Although it made me feel like a bit of a schmuck because I don’t remember feeling much when it happened to me. Weird.) And it just kind of ends before any kind of resolution can happen. You just kind of hope that everything turns out ok for everybody, but you know that their lives are forever changed by this horrible experience.

Go see this movie. It’s painful, but in a way that makes you realize that, either your life isn’t as fucked up as theirs, or that your life isn’t strange in its fuckedness.