Word: baumbach
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Breeding plays a part. Owen, 14, is the son of actors Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates. Serendipity helps too. Write-director Noah Baumbach had shown his script to friends Kline and Cates. When he was having trouble casting the role of Frank, his wife Jennifer said, "We need someone like Owen, someone who is soulful and funny." Cates and Kline let their son audition and, when he was chosen, were on the set with him. The "tough" scenes (spilling his seed in school, trying on his first condom) were the easiest, Baumbach says: "It actually was just faking things...
...novels. As for 12-year-old Frank (Owen Kline), puberty has landed on him like a house after a tornado, and he?s obsessed with spilling his seed in all the wrong places. This catalog of deceits and embarrassments may not sound particularly hilarious, but, trust me, it is. Baumbach?s sympathy for the all-too-human spectacle of lust pratfalling over itself makes the film as funny as it is painful. The only appropriate response to this lacerating brood - whose troubles make the Saraband family, by comparison, seem like the Andersons from Father Knows Best - is the laughter...
...Whale,” to Wes Anderson’s cult classic, “The Royal Tenenbaums.” The comparison isn’t entirely unjustified: both films chronicle the disintegration of elite New York City families headed by vain and delusional patriarchs. Also, Baumbach and Anderson are collaborators—Baumbach co-wrote Anderson’s 2004 film “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.” Though thematically similar, the two films diverge greatly in style: Baumbach substitutes nouvelle vague grittiness for Anderson’s zany magical realism...
Anyway, a terrific movie. That's what Noah Baumbach, son of writers and film critics Jonathan Baumbach and Georgia Brown, has made from the memories of his parents' split when he was a teenager in 1986. The Squid and the Whale is domestic tragedy recollected as comedy: a film whose catalog of deceits and embarrassments, and of love pratfalling over itself, makes it as (excruciatingly) painful as it is (exhilaratingly) funny. Its family quartet--including Laura Linney as wife Joan, Jesse Eisenberg as 16-year-old Walt and Owen Kline as his 12-year-old brother Frank--is a fearless...
...joke--its awesome satiric irrelevance--is the crucial thing about The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. If you go with it, you'll love the film. If you don't, you'll just sit there wondering how (and why) Wes Anderson, the director and a co-writer (with Noah Baumbach), thought this thing up, talked someone into financing it and somehow drew you the viewer into spending good money on this exercise in deadpan postmodernism...