the squid and the whale: noah baumbach's human new york

In principle, at least, I'm skeptical of any movie about worrisome white New Yorkers of the creative or professional persuasion. There are too many movies about them, and too often you suspect they're just the filmmakers' somewhat idealized narratives of their own lives. Woody Allen has almost single-handedly created an excess supply of this genre, and he's not alone.

Noah Baumbach, who directed the new Frances Ha, would be part of the problem if the movies I've seen by him — The Squid and the Whale, Greenberg, and Margot at the Wedding — weren't wonderful. I rewatched The Squid and the Whale this week to figure out why I wanted to give it a pass even though it has the aforementioned New York Problem.

Part of what I like about Baumbach's stuff is that his movies deglamorize their New Yorker subjects, those frowny-faced writers, professors, and would-be artists who are made out to be the objects of sympathy in lesser movies. Baumbach has worked with Wes Anderson on several projects, and like Anderson's characters, Baumbach's people are can be positively craptastic to one another, at least occasionally. On the commentary of the "Special Edition" DVD of The Squid and the Whale, Baumbach puts it this way: "People would say, 'Well, where is the redemption of the character?' and I would answer, somewhat smugly, 'Not in this movie.'"

Bernard, a writer, husband, and father of two boys, has an inflated sense of self and is in a lot of ways the incarnation of the pretentious professor so many people imagine (even if, in my experience, the person is relatively rare). He comes across as obnoxious, but as we learn about his wife's affairs, we see she has ways of being as terrible as he is, even if only off-screen and not so obviously. Bernard is hard to love, but you have the feeling it's because he's honestly inelegant, and he has his own moments of vulnerability.

The dynamic of the movie from the audience perspective is like a tug-of-war between the parents and children: Just as one of the four family members seems to be coming off distinctly better or worse than another, we get a glimpse of their pain, or alternatively, a burst of gratuitous maliciousness. In this way, the delicate balance of your sympathies is restored. It's intensely, distressingly human.

So Baumbach's brutal honesty about people brings the characters to earth, but the cinematography of the movie also has its ways of creating that very frank, intimate tone. On the commentary track, Baumbach explains that he purposely left out those grand establishing shots that another director might have used to bridge scenes. He says that shots of "sunsets over Brooklyn" are just "the point in the movie when people feel they can talk." Whatever his reasons, the effect of this omission is that the city feels very grounded and plain, since all you ever get are views you could pick up yourself if you wandered around. As far as I can tell, there isn't a single crane shot in this movie, or anything much that calls attention to the camera or makes New York seem like anything other than a really dense suburb. Consciously we know it's New York City and it specifically references New York, but it's a New York without the wow.

On top of that, many of the static shots that Baumbach could have just done with a tripod are instead handheld shots with a slight wobble to them. Baumbach says he wanted it so that "you'd always feel just a little bit of a human hand in there," even when he might have just make the camera completely static. That slight wobble, combined with the human-sized shots, makes the images feel like a chronicle of people you actually know — a feeling that's only stronger because the script actually makes them as marginally lovable as the people you know. Another cinematography decision that adds to this is the Super 16 mm format the movie is shot in. Baumbach mentions that he wanted to avoid a "nostalgic" look of a higher-definition format. With the grain that Super 16 gives the movie, it does avoid nostalgia, but maybe more importantly, it works with the rest of the cinematography in that it makes the New Yorkers we're watching a little more gritty, and not in that lurid crime drama way.

The Squid and the Whale doesn't seem to be trying to impress on you how exciting its city or characters are, and so it avoids the trap of being implicitly or explicitly an advertisement for the NYC way of life. It's just a portrait of a dysfunctional family, and it's all the more beautiful for being unbeautiful.