The Squid and the Whale

Noah Baumbach's film has me a bit torn. On the one hand it does an excellent job chronicling the effects of divorce and joint custody on children, but on the other hand it really left me with nothing. Jeff Daniels gives perhaps his best performance to date as the snobby, psuedo-intellectual, past-his-prime, literature professor father who divorces Laura Linney. Their two boys develop attachments to one of their parents -- the older boy to his father and the younger to his mother. Every party involved seems to be in the wrong in one way or another. It's one of those seemingly personal independent films that never transcends its few ideas or its story. The feels like the kind of film that should be much more than it really was.