Actor met film’s daddy dearest
How do you go about creating a character when you are playing a posturing, self- pitying monster, sort of — but not exactly — based on your director’s father?
For Jeff Daniels, a veteran actor who stunningly reinvents himself with his hilarious yet heartbreaking performance in The Squid and the Whale, the answer included a three- hour lunch.
There were three people at the table: Daniels, the filmmaker Noah Baumbach and his semifamous father, novelist Jonathan Baumbach.
“ You’re always looking for things beyond what you see in the script,” Daniels explained in a phone interview from northern California, where he was the subject of a tribute evening at the Mill Valley Film Festival.
“ I was interested in finding out what sorts of things Jonathan Baumbach cared about. The way things turned out, the character is partly based on Jonathan, but a lot of it is fiction.” The movie — made for $1.5 million ( U. S.) and already showing signs of being the season’s sleeper hit — won awards at the Sundance Film Festival and was an audience favourite at the Toronto and New York film festivals.
It is clearly a breakthrough for Noah Baumbach, previously known for Kicking and Screaming and Mr. Jealousy. Squid has already opened to great reviews in New York and Los Angeles and arrives in Toronto theatres Friday. And it seems certain to be on a lot of lists when the time comes to hand out awards — with Daniels at the front of the line for recognition. The movie is a portrait of the artist as a young man. We’re in Brooklyn in the mid-’ 80s as a literary/ academic marriage is unravelling.
Bernard, played by an almost unrecognizably bushy-bearded Daniels, is a pompous English teacher whose novels are not getting the acclaim he feels they deserve. He feels victimized not just because wife Joan ( Laura Linney) has been having an affair but because her recently launched literary career is starting to eclipse his.
( The director’s mother, Georgia Brown, did in fact become better known than her novelist husband, as the film critic of the Village Voice.) Baumbach has a fond but mercilessly satiric take on all four members of this shattered household, including Walt ( Jesse Eisenberg), the precocious, judgmental older son who is based on himself. The result is a movie that portrays the guerril-
la warfare within a highly educated family with such a mixture of knowingness, forgiveness and wit that it deserves comparison with Louis Malle’s great 1971 comedy Murmur of the Heart. But whereas Malle’s young hero sided with his lovably rebellious mother, 16- year- old Walt worships his father.
“I never set out to write a memoir in a literal way,” Baumbach explained in a phone interview from the Manhattan home he shares with his wife, actor Jennifer Jason Leigh.
“ Once I started writing, what’s fictional became all mixed up with what’s real. I felt free to invent details. When you’re creating a movie, at a certain point it doesn’t matter what part is real and what part is not. And looking back at my younger self, I definitely took myself to task a bit.”
Indeed, what makes this movie a brilliant original is the way it captures an adolescent boy’s slavish imitation of his father — the kicker in this case being that his role model comes across as a man any woman would want to divorce. Yet Walt demonizes his mother and blames her for the breakup of the family. As Daniels plays him, Bernard may be a fatuous jerk, but he’s still likeable. He may be ludicrously self- absorbed and selfserving, he may set a terrible example for his two sons, but Daniels finds the vulnerability and insecurity within and turns Bernard into a forgivable bumbler. The subject of the movie is how Walt painfully learns to stop worshipping his father and come to terms with his failings. At the end, he is ready to flee and begin a reconciliation with his mother. The movie is also about the father’s techniques for holding Walt hostage.
“ Jeff really got how funny Bernard is,” explains Baumbach, “but he goes beyond funny. There is something very sad about his eyes. And he just kind of found his way into the character. His body language shows the contradiction between the part of the character that wants to be the centre of attention all the time, and the part that wants to be taken care of. Rehearsing with him was a thrilling experience, because Jeff is an actor who will try everything.”
Daniels explains: “ I never saw Bernard as a villain. But it was important that we never went out of our way to make him sympathetic. I saw him as a man imprisoned by his own ego and brilliance. I had to find the good guy trying to get out. It was my job to see the world the way he does. And from that point of view, I am the victim, and if it were up to me, the marriage would still be intact.”
Postscript: Both real parents came to the premiere of their son’s movie.
“We’re all still close,” says Baumbach. “ And they both really liked it.” mknelman@thestar.ca