Park Slope, Brooklyn, 1986. When Walt Berkman, an impressionable 16-year-old, passes off the Pink Floyd song "Hey You" as his original work and performs it at a high school talent show, he's perfectly content with his rationale. "I felt I could have written it so the fact that it was already written was kind of a technicality." At the same time, his 12-year-old brother Frank drinks beer and wonders openly about his mother's sex life. Both are simply reacting to the fall-out from the bomb dropped on their comfortable family life when their parents, Bernard--a once promising author and now middle-aged academic and Joan--a burgeoning writer with a book deal--announce that they are splitting up. The familiar, steady foundation is shaken. Walt and Frank are relegated to alternating weekends and a jumbled calendar of Mom or Dad nights. The kids are left to grapple with the confusing and conflicted feelings that arise from the sudden collapse of their parents' marriage.

I don’t even know where to begin when talking about this movie, this movie is no fairy tale that’s for sure it takes a stark and depressing look at life, marriage and divorce and the effects it has on not only the two divorcing but what it does to their children as well. The divorce almost destroys the children while the parents are able to move on, try new things and start new lives. I don’t know if the director was trying to make a point on the evil’s of divorce to families but for me that seemed to be the message of the movie. The movie is so twisted it is hard to not only feel sorrow for the children but almost distance yourself from them at the same time. It is a rationalizing that many people must make when they deal with the fact that they cannot be with the other person anymore so much so they are willing to risk the mental welfare of their own children. I don’t think many of that generation of parents were able to comprehend how much harm a divorce could do because even if their parents had been unhappy they stuck together because that’s what you did. You made a vow and you stuck with it through the good times and the bad times, through thick and thin. I am not saying that sometimes divorce isn’t needed, I am saying that like in the movie many times people don’t realize the consequences a divorce will have not only them but their children as well. In fact in the movie they may have made things worse by sticking together too long and cheating on each other so that when they did end it, it ends bitterly and painfully and the children see this and our affected by it. The movie is a powerful look at the ever changing family dynamic where divorce is so common and the movie was enthralling as it drew you into this almost crazed world of pain and being torn between two forces.

Sure there are other things the film tries to say and convey about the upper class and how education doesn’t necessarily mean class. The father is well read, he is intelligent yet he doesn’t see his own actions, he is too engrossed in things like books and movies and art to realize all the consequences his own actions have. He thinks of himself as intellectually superior because he is into art, yet he has no grasp on his own family, his own life that he grips to with an almost fanatical grasp once it is threatened. He never fought to save his marriage when he had it, nor to spend that much time with his children when he could but once that world is shattered he now wants to spend the time, he now wants to save the marriage and do all the little things he never did.

I love Jeff Daniels in this role he has that harsh exterior that is rough not because he doesn’t care but because he just doesn’tt know what his words and actions do to others. You can see Jeff Daniels as the father who really does love his children but never seems able to see what is going on in right in front of him. But it is Laura Linney that makes this movie because its her character that sees what is happening and it is put on her to try and make things right even if it makes her out to be the bad guy. The whole Squid and the Whale sequence is about how she is there and that Daniels is not and how they were always kind of wrestling with each other even if they never realized it. I wouldn’t say she carried the movie because Jeff Daniels is quite marvelous in the movie as well and the two kids William Baldwin and Jesse Eisenberg do a great job for kids as they each go to one parent and despise the other. This movie isn’t for everybody that’s for sure as it touches on some pretty touchy subject material and can be very stark at times but and despite the film being twisted I found myself really enjoying the movie.

Grade: B