Watching this makes you glad you're not one of Noah Baumbach's parents. The writer-director is not claiming this sharp, bitter little comedy as autobiographical, but he does have a brother and his parents did split up in the 80s. The film is set in 1986 and his parents were both writers - as Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney are in the film - so it's really hard not to add two to two and make at least six. The pain of joint custody is all too clear but Baumbach has had the last laugh by turning his juvenile trauma into something we can all relate to and - sometimes in spite of our better natures - laugh at.
You don't need to have had divorced parents to remember those tricky childhood years when you would swallow parental opinion whole or reject it in totality, while waiting for your own critical faculties to arrive. Much of the humour here comes from elder son Walt, played by Jesse Eisenberg. He was the nephew in Roger Dodger, and gets lots more bad sexual advice here, as well as bandying about dad's literary phrases: "minor Fitzgerald" and "minor Dickens" for books he hasn't read and "Kafkaesque" for an author he hasn't studied. "Cause it's written by Franz Kafka," says a potential girlfriend who is reading Metamorphosis.
Daniels, who played an equally useless father in Imaginary Heroes last year, and Linney make real people of their roles (and Daniels, who played Anna Paquin's dad in Fly Away Home, here graduates to her lecturer and lover, across a 27-year age gap.)
The reliably good Daniels - replacing original choice Bill Murray - is selfish, unreasonable and a shocking cultural snob, the sort of dad who turns your trip to the cinema into Blue Velvet when you wanted to see Short Circuit, and who surveys the family bookshelves post-split with exclamations like: "That's my Jude the Obscure". The film has point-scoring to match it's opening tennis match and smart son Baumbach, who wrote the extremely odd Life Aquatic for Wes Anderson, makes it game, set and match by wrapping it all up in 80 minutes and just three weeks of shooting.
