No. 80: The Squid and the Whale
A modern Brooklyn classic
December 05, 2011
2005, dir. Noah Baumbach. Noah Baumbach’s bleakly naturalistic portrait of a Brooklyn family’s unraveling doesn’t skimp on the painful details, from monstrously egotistical fathers to boozing and masturbating 12-year-old sons. It’s the texture of The Squid and the Whale that makes it a modern classic, the journalistic precision with which it captures a slice of bourgeois-bohemian Brooklyn Jewish life. You want to know what it was like to grow up in a book-lined brownstone near Prospect Park in the 1980s? Look no further.
Jody Rosen is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine.