THE SQUID AND THE WHALE and BEE SEASON - endangered species

These two recent films are a matched set. Both depict families in crisis, both setting the blame squarely on the shoulders of the fathers, smart but emotionally absent men — perhaps ciphers for the dilemma of males in contemporary family structures that now demand rethinking of roles. In both, the mothers, dissatisfied with their "traditional" subservient familial roles, provide the impetus for the crack-up and both focus on the impact on sensitive children.

Family tragedy will always be a ripe subject for drama. It is a universal story, with infinite variations, depending on which family member is telling the tale. The Greeks covered the ground (OEDIPUS REX). Shakespeare had a whirl (HAMLET), as did Arthur Miller (DEATH OF A SALESMAN), James Agee (A DEATH IN THE FAMILY), Lillian Hellman (THE LITTLE FOXES), Tennessee Williams (THE GLASS MENAGERIE). It is there as subtext for such disparate mixed genre films as UNFAITHFUL and THE ROYAL TENNENBAUMS.

Eugene O’Neill’s excruciating LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT is the uncredited (and probably unconscious) template for both of these current films. Domineering dad, victimized mom, two siblings damaged by their parents' self-absorption. The classic 1962 film of the great play, directed by Sidney Lumet, starring Katherine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards and Dean Stockwell, may be “dated” to most contemporary viewers. Today’s young people might yawn about the melodramatic acting family's "issues:" an egotistical miserly father, drug-addicted mother, alcoholic and self-pitying sons.

SQUID'S writer / director Noah Baumbach’s father Jonathan, is a novelist and his mother is a critic. He has a younger brother. They lived in Brooklyn’s Park Slope in the 1980's when his parents divorced. So Noah, who has written and directed two previous movies, made this one about “Bernard Berkman,” a novelist, and “Joan,” his wife, who is also a writer, and their two sons, teenage “Walt” and 12 year old “Frank.” He got very talented actors, Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney, Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline (the son of Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates) to play the family.

From the first scene, Dad and Walt use their superiority, real and imagined, to belittle Mom and little Frank. But Mom has had it. She is now a published author in her own right, while Dad's third novel is unpublishable, is reduced to teaching college lit to idolatrous kids and spouting pompous opinions which Walt parrots without question.

Walt has inherited his father’s insufferable smugness and is equally unaware of how socially clumsy he is with girls and how foolish his false pomposity sounds. In one particularly painful but funny scene (that could have been written by Woody Allen), Walt impresses a girl by repeating his father’s pronouncement about Kafka’s “Metamorphoses,” which Walt of course hasn’t himself read. When she later reads it and wants to discuss it with Walt, he repeats another of his father’s phrases, “It’s very Kafkaesque.” She still wants to give him a hand job and maybe sleep with him anyway. Walt is so wrapped in his father’s bullshit about superiority, he tells the girl she has too many freckles. At this point, we fear for this kid’s sanity.

The divorce is shown through the eyes of the boys, each of whom make painful discoveries about their parents and themselves and are left in the end with unsettled futures. We are saddened by these revelations of parents’ weaknesses, because it seems that these boys are too immature to be faced with “adult” realities. The young son acts out, drinking and jerking off at school, cursing at his parents. We're left with a sense that he is the one who will feel the most pain and have the most trouble coping with it. (A hint about Noah Baumbach's brother?)

Walt, the character that Noah most identifies with, begins to see that blindly following his father’s model is disastrous when he gives up the girl he likes, and is caught plagiarizing song lyrics in a school talent show. He is then forced to begin the painful process of coming to grips with his anger and embarrassment at discovering his mother’s sexual nature, then seeing his father screwing a student that Walt is attracted to.

The Mother, being a woman, is more in touch with the emotions involved, is also the stronger person, demanding her freedom, not only from her domineering husband, but also from the constant demands of her children. She has found power and self-esteem as a desirable woman and a creative artist and the children must deal with her as she is now.

You're not meant to like either of the parents - they are not redeemed in the end. It is not a pleasant story to watch, and Baumbach avoids Hollywood ending, where all the characters end in “a better place.” The dad is the same jerk in the end as he was at the start. Frank will probably continue to be a “project,” drawn to self-destructive addictions. Mom, we suspect, will keep searching for romances as material for her novels.

The hope, if there is any to the dreary tale of a family’s doom, is that the boys are smart, well educated, and may have the ability to write their own novels and scripts when and if they grow up and complete their therapy.

An interesting subtext to the story is one not touched upon, but which for me is an elephant in the room. We are never shown any of the writings of the parents in this film, but I wonder whether their lives and those of their children seeped into their work; whether a side of their brains were formulating “characters” while they experienced their drama, whether they used their lives as text. Baumbach’s autobiographical writing must have affected his own family. Curious about how his parents, both writers themselves, view his use of their lives for his art. Are they ambivalent: proud, but hurt? Or are they such committed “artists” that they have blurred the line between “character” and “human?” That would have been perhaps a more interesting theme. O’Neill ordered that his gut wrenching play about his own family’s secrets be kept unpublished until long after his death, a wish his widow overruled to our benefit.

BEE SEASON, its script written by Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal (wife of director Steven Gyllenhaal and mother of actors Jake and Maggie) from a best selling book by Myla Goldberg, contains many of the same elements as SQUID.

First and most importantly, the father is the “heavy” of the piece. Richard Gere plays “Saul Naumann,” a religion prof in Berkeley. Like “Bernard Berkman,” he is Jewish, intellectual, domineering, and completely insensitive to the real needs of his wife and family. And like “Bernard,” “Saul” can teach, but has no creative genius. He understands all about spirituality, but doesn’t feel any. Both dads are egotistical hypocrites who fail their family and cause the crisis.

Second, the teen son, “Aron” (played by Max Minghella, son of director Anthony — in SQUID, the son was played by celebrity son Owen Kline), begins as seemingly idolatrous of his dad, playing string duets and discussing Kabbala. The youngest sibling, 11 year old “Eliza” (newcomer Flora Cross) begins as the quiet child, seemingly ignored by her father. Like the 12 year old boy in SQUID, she is closer to her mother, if any of the parents. Both teens will rebel against their dad, Aron searching for his own spiritual center in a Hare Krishna hottie (“Choli,” played by Kate Bosworth), while in SQUID, Walt tried sex with a literary minded girl. In both movies, it will be up to the youngest to try to save the family.

Third, the mom, “Miriam,” (Juliet Binoche), like Laura Linney in SQUID, is also going to “leave” her insensitive husband in order to survive, although in this case, the departure is into mental illness, some sort of a refuge for a thwarted creative self-realizing impulse. Miriam is revealed to be an obsessive-compulsive fruitcake, who for years has been secretly stealing bits and pieces of glass, wind chimes, and doo-dads from strange houses. When she is finally discovered and breaks down she is relieved to now be “free” to “be herself,” no matter how nutty herself is.

Structurally, the mom’s story in BEE SEASON is the most problematic. At first, she simply seems somewhat detached from her family. We're told of her childhood trauma - her parents abandoned her to boarding school and died in a car crash which she witnessed. She seems functional - works in a laboratory, implying intellect and ability. But soon, we see her driving around, entering a house and taking an earring. We are deceived into suspecting a secret affair. Later, she repeats this act in a different house. Only in Act 3 do we see that she is completely bonkers and has been possibly for her entire life. Somehow she has incorporated her husband's mystic spiritual metaphors about the world as "shattered glass" that needs to be "healed" into a psychotic web, motivated by lack of self-esteem, exacerbated by her husband's dominance. Whew!

The classic feminine dilemma --- "lack of fulfillment" in the the marriage structure --- was supposed to be addressed by the Feminist Revolution of the last forty years. Male and female consciousness was said to be sufficiently "raised," acting to free women from stultifying familial and sexual roles. Yet, judging by recent movies, women are still feeling as trapped as their ancestors, Nora Helmer of Ibsen's A DOLL'S HOUSE, and Tolstoy's eponymous ANNA KARENINA.

And now, added to the classic drama is the dilemma of the male in such families.