Despite the time of year, this post will be about squids and whales, not turkeys

I still haven’t seen Harry Potter, or Capote or Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang. I still haven’t seen Paradise Now or most of the other wonderful obscurities showing at the E-Street. I saw The Squid and the Whale, which is sort of Wes Anderson meets Martin Scorsese and Steven Soderberg, and I loved everything about it except that Anna Paquin seemed to be playing the exact same part she played in 25^th Hour, which, by the way, is a thoroughly overlooked masterpiece that deserved every bit of the ecstatic praise lavished upon it by former Salon critic Charles Taylor in his sputtering, heartfelt 3600 word review. It’s Spike Lee’s only genuinely worthwhile film in the last decade – others have been interesting, but not good – and it’s the only film to address September 11^th’s incomprehensible, unspeakable horror with any sort of depth. It deserves to be held up as a classic. Anyway.

The Squid and the Whale, I think, like 25^th Hour, is also a film about New York, though less about New York as a place than New York as a culture – specifically the upper middle class intellectual set of the 80s. Raised in the small town South (albeit by Yankees), it’s not a culture I’m intimately familiar, yet it feels despairingly accurate. Director Noah Baumbach doesn’t have to explain the intricate roles played by literature and parking and tennis; he simply assumes their importance and lets the audience come to understand it as the film goes on.

It’s also one of the few films that capturees that unnervingly difficult family dynamic created by not just difficult parents, but brilliant, compelling, difficult parents. Most films about family dysfunction like to simplify problems, but Squid shows two very flawed – yet arguably decent – parents whose mistakes aren’t made solely in spite of their brilliance and talent, but often because of it. Their nuerosis and their stubbornness are inseperable from their intellectual strength.

Both Daniels and Linney are just devastating as proud, intelligent, accomplished adults who somehow or another still manage to wreck their lives and their family. The film is a sad reminder of the way intelligence can get the better of its owner, and the unfortunate way even the strongest and most able individuals can, through stubbornness and intellectual pride, shatter their own lives and the lives of those they love.