The Squid
and the Whale
There’s a telling exchange
between Joan, recently separated from her husband (who, like her, is a “literature PhD”)
and her adolescent son, Walt. It goes something
like this. Joan : “Why are you reacting like this, surely a lot of your friends'
parents are divorced?” Walt : “They are, but mine aren’t.” Joan : “Well, now they are”.
To me, such an exchange is a neat
way of pointing both at the gulf in resources that children and
adults have to help them deal with a divorce, and the kind of society that
Joan and her family are living in, in 1980s Brooklyn.
Here, it is clear,
right from the off, that Walt and his younger brother, Frank, are keen to learn
from their parents. Walt assumes his father’s taste (without his erudition) in literature, a position
born of genuine admiration for the man, and eagerly seeks his advice on dealing
with girls, ironically. It's both funny and tragic that his father urges him to play the field (much like
the grandfather in Little Miss Sunshine) because Walt and his girlfriend seem to have such a sweet thing going.
For his part, young Frank is keen to extend his working vocabularly to
include the expletives that he hears his father utter when exasperated at tennis.
This is reminiscent of the humour that can be found in teaching a toddler a rude word which they parrot unknowingly.
Here, because Frank is beginning to know what these words signify, the humour isn't so straightforward, but it still gets a laugh.
Perhaps for reasons of gender, (how would things have played out
between two daughters, for example) the boys’ mode of engagement with their
mother has a slightly different flavour. What’s nice about all this is the
style, of storytelling by vignette, so that we understand that we are being
shown these things rather in the spirit of reminiscence than dialectic. This effect
is mirrored by the editing, itself freer because the plotline isn’t strongly
linear.
Here we get the sense that the characters of each family member
changes or grows, if at all, in reaction to an external impetus. Perhaps change is forced upon them. The film concludes
with an ambiguous scene that may point either to Walt’s inchoate maturity, or
to his efforts to understand a memory of himself as a young child. This memory has been dislodged and brought to the
surface of his awareness by the shockwaves created by the divorce. This is one example of
how it's not always clear whether the characters
would have had the same "arcs" in the absence of the divorce. However, because so much care is
made in describing the four personalities, it's
probably accurate enough to describe this movie as a character-driven comedy. Or maybe, in deference to the subject matter,
and some not-so pleasant episodes dealing with Frank's burgeoning sexual self-awareness, we should make that
black comedy. It's funny either way.