Another brick in the wall

The Squid and the Whale

(2005)

Inspired to watch this yesterday while on the stair machine reading the New Yorker profile of Noah Baumbach and his love-and-writing partner Greta Gerwig, some of which is about his parents' reaction to this autobiographical treatment of their breakup and its effect on teenaged Noah and his younger brother.

As painful as this is to watch, it remains for me one of the best examples of the limning of characters simultaneously unbearably awful and irresistibly engaging. Part of that is great acting, of course, particularly by Jeff Daniels and Jesse Eisenberg and also, to a lesser extent (only because her character is less awful to begin with), by Laura Linney, but I think the lion's share of the credit goes to the writer-director. Domestic dysfunction in Park Slope at its most train-wreck compelling.