The Squid and the Whale
Noah Baumbach recently came out with a new film, The Mariage Story. It seemed to have received good reviews and I wanted to see it. But I thought I should first see his earlier film, The Squid and the Whale, which also covered the topic of divorce. The Squid and the Whale is intense.
It manages to portray well how two boys (one is about 17 and the other one about 10) gradually learn that there are problems in their parents’ marriage. Before long, the boys are called to a family meeting where they learn what they have already sensed: the parents will separate. The film is so much told from the point of view of the children that we never learn exactly why the love the parents cooled and why they separate. The parents come across simply as egotistical. We intuit there is a lot more to the parents’ breakup. Noah Baumbach seems to have been licking his own wounds of being a divorcee child so much that the did not have the resources to try to explain why two people who clearly at one point very much wanted to be together found it necessary to separate and cause the children’s’ lives to be a lot more complicated. Now I am curious if in the Marriage Story—where I hear the parents divorce while staying together as a family— manages to do more justice to what leads parents to uncouple despite the huge costs for everyone involved.