The Squid and the Whale

Director Noah Baumbach

The director surrounded by his cast at Sundance, 2005

THE SQUID AND THE WHALE                A-                   

USA  (88 mi)  2005  d:  Noah Baumbach

Joint custody blows

Hilarious, angry, and devastating all at the same time, an emotionally anguishing film, showing us a well-educated upper middle class Brooklyn family in deterioration, as the liberal-minded, openly progressive parents one day announce to their two close-knit sons that they are separating.  What follows is a walking nightmare for all participants, but especially devastating to the two boys, who are divided up like leftover helpings for dinner, mom’s night or dad’s night, with rules that they must strictly adhere to that make little or no sense.  Jeff Daniels plays Bernard, one of the most despicable characters seen onscreen short of a cold-blooded killer, a smug, overbearing know-it-all father who uses knowledge as an absolute, who was a successful writer at one time but now toils in obscurity as a literary professor, blaming everyone for his troubles but himself.  He’s a terrible judge of character, however, especially within his own family, as no one else’s opinion counts except his own, and he’s constantly defining the world around him with set-in-stone judgments and conclusions, including his own wife and children, confining them to a world that exists only in the narcissistic arrogance of his own mind, displaying little self-awareness, resorting to self-pity when he doesn’t get his way, reduced to his standard comeback, “Don’t be difficult.” As a result, the older son is a carbon copy, an opinionated copycat who blames his mom for their separation, simply because his dad does, and refuses to have anything to do with her.  Laura Linney as Joan is also a writer, but is constantly denigrated as second rate by dad, so when she breaks from the nest, it’s her writing that gets recognized, and with her newborn freedom, she literally blooms, like the lilies of the field, much to her husband and older 16-year old son (Jesse Eisenberg) Walt’s outright hatred and jealousy.  The younger 12-year old son Frank (Owen Kline) is more in tune with the softer nature of his mom, but as we watch his world unravel, it veers into painfully unfamiliar territory.  As time passes, everyone’s shortcomings become more evident, allowing emotional positions to shift.  What is amazing here is how much the children resemble their parents, where at times it’s downright creepy.    

Billy Baldwin, Anna Paquin and Halley Feiffer are all excellent in side roles, while the acting overall is superb.  Having the look of cinéma vérité, grainy, shot on Super 16mm with a handheld camera, this is one of the better written and edited films out there, as there is no wasted motion whatsoever, every scene flows so perfectly into the next, which is significant as the exquisite pacing increases the dramatic power by keeping everything so compact and concise.  What is said, and how it is said, is simultaneously humorous and brutal, like a variation on Mike Nichols’ Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), where words so skillfully utilized become weapons.  The film never dwells or lingers, and always adds the grace notes of wit and humor, but the cumulative effect reveals a slow deterioration of the kid’s personalities, with moments that feel like a descent into madness.  The accompanying music sounds dated, feeling like the epitome of indie light, much of it humorous references from other films, yet always in synch with the material, which is surprisingly original, brutally honest, and openly revelatory, revealing the intricate personal details of unraveling relationships from a divorce, where the safety net has been pulled out from under them, leaving them in a no man’s land of unfamiliar territory.  This is a people behaving badly film, displaying some of the more egregious behavior, yet the underlying circumstances of clashing forces are carefully scrutinized, particularly the effects on the children, often overlooked, yet here it becomes the central focus.  The film was written with them in mind, as Baumbach is a product of a mid 80’s divorce between two literary parents (novelist Jonathan Baumbach and former Village Voice film critic Georgia Brown), where the personal details of this film speak like a confessional, weirdly bizarre yet so absurdly devastating, where the distance of time allows for a humorous perspective, which may be the director’s saving grace, as otherwise he’d be consumed by the depths of the horror and grief, as it’s a very male-centric film, where so much of the film is viewed through the lens of a wounded and self-absorbed male psyche, where the arrogance and outright delusions of the father are passed onto his sons, so representative of what today would be described as toxic male behavior. 

Much of the film revolves around the idea of privilege, almost exclusively white privilege, which allows you to get away with almost anything, as rich kids are overly pampered and nothing is ever their fault, where they’re given a longer leash than others in similar circumstances, as wealth offers an unspoken protection.  Using his father’s condescending literary opinions as gospel, Walt blindly mimics his every word, disparaging anyone else’s views, exactly as his father does, where all that matters to him is the ultimate judgement, speaking authoritatively, which he utters without even reading the material.  He actually manages to appear intellectual on the surface, yet has no underlying foundation.  This culminates with Walt winning a school talent contest with what he claims is an original song, except it was written by Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, Pink Floyd - Hey You (Official Video) YouTube (4:34), part of the best-selling album of 1980, The Wall, a rock opera selling over 30 million copies (and the best-selling concept double album ever), ending up having to return the prize money, offering the absurd explanation that he “could have written it,” which speaks to the entitlement these kids feel.  However, this also leads to a mandatory therapy session that is remarkable in its understated impact, as it literally opens a new door of self-realization, suddenly questioning for the first time the impact of hero worshipping his father.  Frank, on the other hand, is left alone so often that he routinely raids the liquor cabinet, drinking beer, uttering the profanity of a sailor on shore leave, while also developing abnormal sexual habits that are beyond disturbing, accentuated by the music of Tangerine Dream, Tangerine Dream Love on a real train original - YouTube (5:12), which comes into play when his father inexplicably leaves him alone for three days (with his mother on a trip out of town), never bothering to pick him up, as scheduled.  One of the greatest strengths of the film is the depiction of the parents, whose separate lives are so meticulously organized, right down to who gets the cat on what night, so their neglectful behavior, particularly when it comes to Frank, just seems so improbable.  It does not seem very likely that such well-educated parents, clueless and self-centered as they are, whose interest in their children borders on the obsessive, would allow that to happen, yet it’s a clear indication of falling through the cracks, where the hideousness of this act can’t be overstated.  The spiraling aftereffects of their marital breakup are starkly accurate, unsparing and brutally depicted, at worst sad and psychologically horrific, where it takes the poetry and painful anguish of consummate New Yorker Lou Reed, Lou Reed - Street Hassle (complete music video) - YouTube (11:00), to turn these catastrophic events into an anthem for our times. 

Sundance Directing Award 

American dramatic: Noah Baumbach, “The Squid and the Whale”

Sundance Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award 

American dramatic: Noah Baumbach, “The Squid and the Whale”

Steve Jobs

STEVE JOBS                B       
USA  (122 mi)  2015  ‘Scope  d:  Danny Boyle         Official Website

It’s life’s illusions I recall.
I really don’t know life at all. 

—Joni Mitchell, “Both Sides Now,” 1969, Joni Mitchell - Both Sides, Now [Original Studio Version ... YouTube (4:30)

Who knew Bob Dylan was a driving force behind the popularization of the computer on the Internet?   But if you watch this film Dylan and Steve Jobs are interconnected forces striving for social change.  Michael Fassbender may have been saner wearing a cartoon, papier-mâché head in 2014 Top Ten List #10 Frank , a film where music literally masks his mad obsessions and personal psychoses.  But as Steve Jobs, the overcontrolling, egomaniacal force behind an as yet undiscovered corporate product, demanding all the credit himself, though it remains unclear what it is exactly that he does do other than tyrannically browbeat everyone associated with his product while viciously undermining and demeaning the efforts of all others involved, placing himself center stage in his own Barnum & Bailey circus act, billed as “the greatest show on earth,” where he’s certain his innovations will revolutionize the way the world operates.  Who, other than himself, knew this would actually happen?  Curiously, as written by Aaron Sorkin, adapting Walter Isaacson’s book by the same name in 2011 (released 19 days after Jobs’ death), the film contrasts his enormous ambition with this swelled notion of what he would become, accentuating the abysmal failures of his first two product launchings, the first Macintosh computer in 1984 and the neXT “black cube” in 1988, not exactly humbling experiences, where the film is made up of the real time moments immediately preceding Jobs taking the stage before an anxiously anticipatory public, before finally realizing all his dreams with the release of desktop iMac in 1998, each section shot differently on 16 mm, 35 mm, and high definition digital.  One of the more startling reactions after seeing this film is:  who the hell is Joanna Hoffmann (played astonishingly by Kate Winslet, who has to be among the frontrunners for Best Supporting Actress)?  She deserves a medal for simply putting up with this man all these years (and did apparently two years in a row at Apple in 1981 and 1982 when a satirical award was given to her as “the person who did the best job of standing up to” the boss), showing such an alarming degree of patience and professional reserve as his world class marketing executive, where she is the only other person in the room who has any idea how his mind works and feeds off it constantly while making sure all the meticulous preparations before the momentous events are in place. 

While not nearly the triumph of Aaron Sorkin’s earlier, more incisively written portrait of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in David Fincher’s The Social Network (2010), which felt more like a quick-witted, highly inventive film instead of a more standard biographical approach, part of the problem is the structure itself, as it is entirely comprised of smaller, behind-the scenes moments, and while often humorous and cleverly written, it does offer an opportunity to view Jobs in connection to the world around him, where he is continually portrayed as an overbearing, arrogantly pompous ringleader continually driving his own personal ambitions above all else, it also resembles similar territory explored by the Coen brothers in Inside Llewyn Davis (2012), taking particular interest in focusing upon a subject “prior to” a major cultural shift that changed the nation.  In each the center of attention happens to be a particularly loathsome individual whose damaging flaws potentially undermine their own creative ingenuity, yet in Walter Isaacson’s biography, Jobs is described as the “creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.”  Almost lost is the fact that by the time the film begins, Jobs and his computer whiz high school friend Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogan) have already made millions by co-founding Apple in 1976, with Wozniak designing the products while Jobs was the clever snake oil salesman who pitched the first mass-produced personal computers, Apple I and Apple II, as the new wave of the future.  With the idea of breaking away on his own, the film suggests his competitive mean streak of denouncing those that helped him get where he is today is all part of his personally conniving yet sophisticated sales pitch to promote new ideas that have yet to be realized, but only because technology has not advanced that far yet, continually lagging behind the creative process, which is how Jobs distances himself from his old friend Wozniak, as despite the technological advances in leaps and bounds, it simply can’t keep up.     

Despite all the ballyhooed hype surrounding his product, holding others to a standard of perfection that he can’t remotely match himself, this film is like pulling back the curtain and exposing the wizard in THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939), where he’s revealed to be just a man.  In each case it’s quite a shock to the audience inevitably preferring all the razzle dazzle to the ordinariness of real life.  While Jobs is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, his ex-girlfriend and high school sweetheart Chrisann (Katherine Waterston) is forced to beg for money, literally going on welfare for his thoughtless refusal to pay child support for his out of wedlock child, where the man is humbled in so many ways (though without ever realizing it) by the sheer force of good will that comes from his daughter Lisa, who he refuses to recognize.  “I’m not your father,” he says on several occasions in front of Lisa, played by Makenzie Moss when she first hears it at the age of five.  Perhaps unintentionally, the smaller story about Lisa (played by three different actresses), who is present in each of the three launches depicted, is a much more compelling portrait than the larger surrounding drama of Jobs himself, despite another Herculean effort by Michael Fassbender, as she is the lesser developed but more vitally interesting subject in each instance as compared to the more ego-driven, madly out-of-control Frankenstein invention that is Jobs, where his human shortcomings are at the center of the picture, highlighted by his ongoing difficulties in taking a larger role in her life, where she turns out to be his Achilles heel.  Lisa actually has verve and personality and a burning desire to be loved and appreciated, while Jobs allows her to play with a now outdated interactive computer named after her called the Apple Lisa which she uses to impressively draw a picture, which remains one of the poignant moments of his entire life.  It is only after this minor victory, his invention succeeding with his own daughter while failing miserably on the technical front, with his latest design unable to say “Hello,” as advertised, where Jobs agrees to pay Chrisann whatever she needs.  Simultaneous to this little unplanned family visit, we’re witness to an overbearing Jobs bulling and browbeating his entire team with unreachable expectations, but no one worse than software architect Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg) who can’t magically make it all happen, eventually implementing a plan of deception to fool the audience into believing that it works, even when it doesn’t.  Jobs rationalizes this sleight of hand is not really an ethics violation, convinced that by the time the product is released, “it will work.”    

After a long, drawn-out power struggle, Jobs is booted out of Apple the next year in 1985 under mysterious circumstances, where an obviously offended Jobs claims he was fired, while CEO John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), one of Jobs’ strongest supporters, has a different interpretation that we only learn later.  Once more, the next launch four years later is a computer touted as an educational product, even as it’s priced out of the reach of most colleges, which, of course, doesn’t work either, as the machine simply doesn’t perform yet what it’s designed to do, leaving Jobs in a precarious position as he’s about to introduce it before a filled-to-capacity opera house lined with voraciously interested teachers and students who believe in the hype.  Nonetheless, he’s in surprising good spirits, having brought over an entire team from Apple to help him with this new design, where Lisa is now nine (played by Ripley Sobo), mysteriously pulled out of school for the occasion where she’s seen wearing Walkman headphones.  Asked what she’s listening to, she indicates “Both Sides Now,” a “really old” Joni Mitchell song where her father can, surprisingly, recite the lyrics, where suddenly he doesn’t seem so distant, but only for the moment, as he rather infamously has it out with a highly perturbed Steve Wozniak who is himself being pushed out of the Jobs inner circle, labeled a betrayer who helped push Jobs out, where the two engage in a dysfunctional family drama hurling incendiary verbal barbs at one another in front of friends, coworkers and the press, where rumors are swirling suggesting Jobs may actually be back as the head of Apple, which has reached economic stagnation.  Still, Jobs is utterly speechless when his emotionally torn daughter gives him a big hug before she leaves, indicating “I want to live with you.”  Rather than the happy family reunion that some might have preferred, Jobs never really gave the idea a thought, instead he is emphatically anointed as the “chosen one,” returning as the CEO of a company on the verge of bankruptcy, needing the brilliance of his ideas to reshape and envision the future, where there is a clever use of flashback sequences to reimagine how it all began when they were long-haired kids hanging out in the garage, but now Jobs was more than happy to fill the bill, going on an unprecedented run of successes that are only hinted at in the film, like the iMac, iTunes, Apple Stores, the iPod, the iTunes Store, the iPhone, the App Store, and the iPad.  Still, he’s on the receiving end of an obviously angry tirade from his now 19-year old daughter (Perla Haney-Jardine) who has finally learned to reject him as the deadbeat dad he always was, but ever the consummate salesman, he promises to find a way to “put five hundred or a thousand songs in your pocket.” finally admitting that “I’m poorly made,” as if he’s little more than one of his own machines, luring her back into his good graces as he hears the thunderous sounds of the applause awaiting him as he magnanimously steps onto the stage into the resounding acclaim of the flashbulbs and bright lights, finally earning the adoration of a fickle public.