Product Description

When their parents announce that they are splitting up 16 year old walt & 12 year old frank are relegated to alternating weekends & a jumbled calendar of mom or dad nights. The kids are left to grapple with the confusing & conflicted feelings that arise from the sudden collapse of their parents marriage. Studio: Sony Pictures Home Ent Release Date: 01/22/2008 Starring: Jeff Daniels Laura Linney Run time: 81 minutes Rating: R

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10594 in DVD
• Brand: Sony
• Released on: 2006-03-21
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: AC-3, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD-Video, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, French, Korean, Portuguese
• Dubbed in: French, Portuguese
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: 3.00 pounds
• Running time: 81 minutes

Amazon.com
The Squid and the Whale follows the divorce of Joan (Laura Linney, You Can Count on Me) and Bernard Berkman (Jeff Daniels, The Purple Rose of Cairo) as it wreaks havoc on the emotional lives of their two sons, Walt (Jesse Eisenberg, Roger Dodger) and Frank (Owen Kline, The Anniversary Party). Though there's no plot in the usual sense, the movie progresses with growing emotional force from the separation into the bitter fighting between Joan and Bernard and the hapless, floundering behavior of Walt and Frank, who act out through plagiarism, sexual acts, and drinking. Some viewers may find the ending too diffuse; others will appreciate that writer/director Noah Baumbach (Mr. Jealousy) doesn't wrap up the messiness of life in a false cinematic package. Either way, viewers will appreciate how the specificity of the personalities makes The Squid and the Whale so compelling, as Baumbach has drawn the characters with such detail, both engaging and off-putting, that they leap off the screen. Naturally, he's greatly helped by the cast: Linney, Eisenberg, Kline, and especially Daniels bite into these often unsympathetic portraits and give fearlessly honest performances, interlocked in both painful and funny ways--rarely have family dynamics been captured so vividly. If there was an ensemble Oscar, this cast would deserve it. --Bret Fetzer

Customer Reviews

Modern Classic!
I don't know how Laura Lindley does it but I can always count on her being in a great independent film. This one is wonderful though I still can't make sense of the ending. A couple divorce and the poor relationship between the couple and the boys disintegrate even further. This family wasn't content or happy before the divorce (which makes sense) but the divorce is an adjustment in itself. The father is a writer who can't get anything published while the mother is prospering. She finds other men to date and the father takes up with one of his college students. The older son admires his father while the younger boy vastly prefers his mother. So what happens? A lot, but it is not neatly wrapped up in a package. The movie begins and it ends. I would love to know who is the squid or the whale. That could provide more information, but it isn't clear. It is meant not to be clear so I will think a bit more about it. I'm sure this movie will be debated in college classrooms and essays for years to come.

Bad, Bad Luck
THIS REVIEW IS ABOUT THE PACKAGING NOT THE FILM...

As happens far too often the copy of the DVD of this film I received arrived with the disc off the spindle and scratched to high heaven. Sony agreed to take it back but wanted me, in these days of high petrol prices, to take it out to a FedEx in the suburbs. They offered no alternative. And since the price it would of cost me in gas was more than I paid for the disc in the first place I decided against returning the unwatchable disc. Hence I couldn't review the film if I wanted to.

As for Sony shame on them for their lack of environmental consciousness...

The moral? Look before you leap. Think twice before you buy a Sony/Columbia product.

Call me Diogenes...

Not worth it for me.
I was expecting great things from The Squid and the Whale. After all, critical buzz about the picture when it was released was good, and the film was nominated for some Golden Globes and and Oscar. Well, either my hopes were too high, or the film just wasn't as good as everyone made it out to be.

The film relates the disintegration of the Berkman family, who are living in 1980s Brooklyn. Father Bernard (Jeff Daniels) is a pompous, know-it-all novelist who has begun the downward arc of his career path and is now teaching literature at a college. His wife, Joan (Laura Linney), is the long-suffering mother of their two children. (But not TOO long-suffering. She's had several affairs.) When Bernard and Joan decide to call it quits, they bring children Walt (16) and Frank (12) in for a family conference to break the news. The children naturally find themselves taking sides. The duration of the movie shows how the children and their parents cope with the divorce and their changing lives.

What IS good about the film - all the performances are great, with Daniels in particular fully inhabiting Bernard's academic elitism and utter vanity. Bernard is just always so sure he's right about everything. Plus, he has an angry competitive streak and doesn't seem to want anyone else to win anything except him. (No wonder Joan was boinking other guys, eh?) In addition, the characters are rendered fully on the page, although continuous reinforcements of who they are (rather than who they will become?) become tiresome as the script grinds along.

What I didn't like - The plot isn't particularly compelling. We watch as the family breaks apart and how each member of the family deals with this event in different ways. But because I didn't like most of the characters, I found it difficult to care too much one way or the other. Also, I thought the movie was overly preoccupied with sex. Each character has their own manifestation of a sexual storyline, and that felt very contrived to me. In addition, there was alot of profanity, particularly from the youngest character, that I didn't think was necessary or added much to the story. But mostly, I didn't feel that enough HAPPENED. I didn't feel that the characters made any meaningful inner journeys or underwent any meaningful changes. I just felt like there was alot of extraneous junk in the script that could have been jettisoned in exchange for more of an actual plotline.

So, regardless of the film's critical acclaim, I can't recommend it. If I could get those two hours of my life back, I think I would.