The Squid and the Whale

(Herald rating: * * * )

As New York as a yellow cab, this intensely autobiographical movie about a family in meltdown is nonetheless driven by an austerely European sensibility.

Squid has been effusively praised by American critics most of whom would have known Baumbach's mother, sometime Village Voice film critic Georgia Brown and her sometime husband, novelist Jonathan Baumbach. Most reviews have singled out the blend of poignancy and black humour, and the writing and acting skill on show is undeniable. But it's still as bleak and comfortless as being in the home of slight acquaintances as they methodically dismember their marriage with blunt instruments.

Brown and Baumbach are here Joan and Bernard Berkman (Linney and Daniels) who live in hip, arty Park Slope, Brooklyn, with their teenage sons Walt and Frank (Eisenberg and Kline). The first line of the film ("Me and you against mum and dad," says Walt) pretty much sums it up. This is, in the end, a film about the two sons' attempts to survive their parents' appalling behaviour.

Bernard, a once-successful novelist trading on his tattered laurels as a creative writing teacher, is mired in mid-life ennui that he tries to disguise with pretentious bluster (he refers to Kafka as "one of my predecessors") and lechery towards students (including jailbait specialist Paquin); Joan has literary ambitions of her own and soothes her unhappiness with dangerous liaisons. Predictably the teenagers act out their distress at this state of affairs: Walt, Baumbach's stand-in, imitates his Dad, trying to impress girls by describing Kafka's Metamorphosis, which he hasn't read, as "Kafkaesque" and passing off Pink Floyd's Hey, You as his own at a school talent quest; Frank, confused, wants his Mum.

Baumbach observes the wreckage of the family through an episodic series of scenes that are brilliantly drawn and performed. Daniels, an under-rated actor who has always been hampered by his baby face, is devastatingly cynical and Linney - one of the great actors of her generation - is at once brittle and vengeful. But everyone's so deeply unlikeable and it all seems to add up to an act of private catharsis that is so wrenchingly personal it's almost embarrassing to watch.

The film climaxes in front of a diorama in the New York Museum of Natural History. Called "Clash of the Titans" it's a life-size model of the title's creatures locked in a lethal undersea embrace. The symbolism is heavy-handed enough to make you groan until it clicks: this was the film's starting point and the rest was a way of justifying it.

It's enough to make you wish Baumbach had painted a picture, rather than engage in this very accomplished and irredeemably grim exercise.

CAST: Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney, Jesse Eisenberg, Owen Kline, Anna Paquin, William Baldwin
DIRECTOR: Noah Baumbach
RUNNING TIME: 88 Mins
RATING: M, offensive language and sexual themes
SCREENING: Rialto