Walking and Talking

Photo by Max S. Gerber

Near the end of writer-director Noah Baumbach’s debut feature, Kicking and Screaming, there’s a scene in which Grover (Josh Hamilton), a terminally indecisive, recently graduated English major in an unspecified East Coast college town, bounds up to an airline ticket counter and demands to be put on the next flight to Prague, where his ex-girlfriend, Jane (Olivia D’Abo), is studying for a year. “I have to go,” he pleads. “I know that when I review this whole episode in my head, I’m not going to know what I did or why I did it. But it’ll make a good story of my young adult life: the time I chose to go to Prague.” It’s a setup for one of those grandly romantic airport finales you’ve seen in a thousand movies, save for one sticky detail. Grover realizes he doesn’t have his passport — people in grandly romantic airport finales aren’t supposed to need passports, are they? — to which the ticket agent sympathetically replies, “You can always go tomorrow.” Would that it were so easy.

Baumbach was 25 years old when he wrote and directed that scene, looking back on his college years from the wide end of the telescope. When I saw the movie in the fall of 1995, I was still a student at USC, for whom the world of post-collegiate responsibility seemed like a distant galaxy. Yet, in spite of that gap, as I watched Grover’s destiny play out on the screen, Baumbach’s film felt truthful and lived-in to me in a way that the raft of other so-called Generation X movies — with their masturbatory, we’re-doomed-to-be-less-successful-than-our-parents ­musings — didn’t. Unlike them, it had something meaningful to say about what it was to be young and unmoored at the tail end of the 20th century. And I took comfort in Grover’s conviction that one solitary, impulsive gesture might alter the entire course of a life. Writing about the film in the pages of our campus newspaper, I (somewhat grandly) pronounced, “You don’t have to be ‘twentysomething’ in order to understand [the movie’s] sense of confused hesitation. We all constantly reconcile our wistful longings with the harsh realities of life... as we are brought, kicking and screaming, into the real world — whatever that may be.” Pulling that yellowed volume down from a bookshelf as I began to write this article, I noticed that the review was printed directly opposite an advertisement for, of all things, the study-abroad program at the American University of Paris.

To read Paul Malcolm's review of the film The Squid and the Whale, click here. To read Ella Taylor's interview with Jeff Daniels, click here.

In the years since, as Baumbach continued to make films and I continued to write about them, I watched the progression of his career with interest, no matter how rare the opportunities. Baumbach’s second feature, Mr. Jealousy (1997), was a modestly diverting romantic comedy, very much under the sign of Woody Allen, about a neurotic New York schoolteacher (Eric Stoltz) so paranoid about his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriends that he ends up joining the group-therapy session of a renowned psychiatrist (a pre­Sopranos Peter Bogdanovich) just to spy on one of them. Then, with most of the same cast and crew — many of them already holdovers from Kicking — Baumbach embarked on Highball, an improvisational romp shot over six days immediately following the wrap of Mr. Jealousy. The movie was never properly finished; Baumbach had a falling out with the producer and, by the time Highball emerged on video, he’d replaced his name with a pseudonym. After that, nothing. Not a peep from Baumbach for the better part of the next decade.

“The honest answer is that I really wanted to make a movie very badly,” Baumbach says in retrospect. “I did a book adaptation. I wrote a pilot that got shot but didn’t get picked up. There were a lot of possibilities. But when I look back on it now, in a way it was good that none of those things happened, because I think they all kind of got me here.”

“Here” is The Squid and the Whale, Baumbach’s wry, beautifully observed account of two brothers coming of age as their parents’ marriage crumbles around them. Premiering in the dramatic competition of the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, it won awards for best screenplay and best director, signaling a welcome end to its creator’s long artistic drought and prompting Baumbach to remark that he felt like he’d finally made his first “real” movie. When I ask Baumbach to elaborate on that, he says, “It’s one of those things that’s true — it’s an honest answer — yet in some ways, I don’t know what it means. But I stick with it because it’s an honest answer. I think it’s just a representation of who I am now versus who I was when I was 25 or 28.”

On a sunny Friday afternoon in late September, Baumbach and I are walking down Broadway, just after the official New York Film Festival press screening of The Squid and the Whale. It’s the start of a busy few days for the filmmaker that will include two appearances at the concurrent New Yorker festival — on Saturday, an onstage interview about the film, and on Sunday, a reading of one of Baumbach’s contributions to the magazine’s “Shouts & Murmurs” section, about a dog who thinks he’s Tom Cruise. Baumbach says he’s been practicing his adrenalized bark at home with his longtime girlfriend — and, as of Labor Day, wife — actress Jennifer Jason Leigh. Then, on Monday night, Squid will have its gala NYFF screening before a crowd that includes lots of old friends — and Baumbach’s parents, author Jonathan Baumbach (The Return of Service, Babble) and former Village Voice film critic Georgia Brown. Their divorce, when Noah was 14, served as a starting point for the script. But while he shot his third authorized feature on the very streets where he grew up, and even dressed star Jeff Daniels in items borrowed from his father’s wardrobe, Baumbach is quick to downplay the idea that the film is an exact historical record of his youth. “When I talk about this being in some ways my most personal movie, I’m really thinking less of the subject matter than the aesthetic — the way it’s written, the way it’s shot, the way it’s acted, the way it’s art-directed, everything,” he says as we sit down for lunch at a nearby restaurant. “I feel like it represents me — the whole thing is me in a way — and I’m not thinking, ‘Oh, that’s my father, my mother, me, my brother.’ I’m not looking at it that way. Obviously, writing about material that was close to me was part of it, but at the same time I felt like I’d written the best script that I’d ever written, I’d raised the bar for myself, and now I had to make this movie. I got a little scared. I didn’t want to fuck it up.”