The Filet of the Neighborhood

The Squid and the Whale (Part II -- continued from yesterday's post). The movie centers on a family in crisis and a power shift from Bernard (Jeff Daniels) to Joan Berkman (Laura Linney). Once separated after seventeen years of marriage, they fight over equal custody issues in an epic (if not atypical) struggle over every little thing down to visiting hours, books, the family cat, and the last dollar.

The viewer cringes in understanding – this is dark comedy as well as drama. To some extent everyone is wounded, especially the confused sons, Walt and Frank, who take sides and act out in different ways. Joan, though, is resilient and energized by the changes wrought.

Bernard, essentially the villain, is fun to watch because his character is so well articulated by the script and by Jeff Daniels’ nuanced performance. He is a bitter man, petty, bullying, self-pitying, cheap, unreflective, a sore loser, and yet sometimes hilarious and even sympathetic. He wears shabby professorial clothes and sports a gnarly, unkempt beard. A writer with a huge ego, he is a baseless snob and mostly self-defeating.

Still, it’s entertaining to hear his one bad idea after another, his one silly pronouncement after another. To him, unless something is “very dense and very interesting,” it’s “not serious.” He’s pretentious. Trying to impress Lili (Anna Paquin), one of his undergraduate students, he tells her: “You’d like Kafka. One of my predecessors. . . ” He has rules everyone must follow, hates “pressure,” and often chides everyone else whenever he feels frustrated, which is most of the time: “don’t be difficult.” Yet he can never achieve enough critical distance to see himself as he is or how he might change for the better.

Bernard is cheap, which rarely fails to cause me to wince. He lets Sophie, his older son Walt’s sweet and precocious girlfriend, split the bill for a dinner on which he’s ungraciously tagged along. He refers to his seedy new home as “the filet of the neighborhood,” even though it’s clearly more like leftovers.

But Bernard has a brief reprieve in his student Lili right out of Wonder Boys: “She was a junkie for the printed word. Lucky for me, I manufactured her drug of choice.” (Grady Tripp, Bernard’s Doppelgänger, about his own student friend, Hannah). She needs a room, he’s “got an extra” and they quickly begin a brief fling until she realizes, even at twenty, what a jerk he is, especially his “rules.”


One of the more poignant scenes shows Bernard opening a letter from a prospective agent, only to discover it's a rejection note. He lies to cover this defeat, but the distraught look on Jeff Daniels' face looks excruciatingly real. The humane viewer can't help but feel some sympathy.

The Squid and the Whale provides a good case study in character development, conflict, plot, tone, and setting.

Today's Rune: Journey.

Today's Birthdays: Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin, Judy Blume.