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PARK CITY -- A wry exercise in acute observation and emotional distancing, Noah Baumbach's "The Squid and the Whale" represents what's best in autobiographical filmmaking. By re-examining the pain and confusion of growing up, then filtering that through the comic lens of fiction, Baumbach has made a deft and downright funny movie about what happens to kids when mom and dad break up. Starring Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney as the warring but not uncaring parents, "The Squid and the Whale" should do good business in and possibly outside the art house circuits.

In the Park Slope section of Brooklyn in 1986, teenager Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) and his adolescent brother Frank (Owen Kline) live in what they believe is a normal though bookish Jewish household. Bernard (Daniels) and Joan (Linney) Berkman both have doctorates in English lit, so books are a natural design element and dinner conversation revolves around the classics. Indeed, dad's dining-table pronouncements, containing as they do a whiff of intellectual pretension, sound like extensions of his college lectures.

An undercurrent of disharmony between the adults goes largely unnoticed by the youngsters until that fateful day they are told to return home directly after school for a family conference. Dad winds up moving into depressing digs with peeling paint across the Park. The kids hate the place but must stay there on his days.

Dad pleads his case to both sons: His flagging career as a novelist, heading in the opposite direction from that of his wife's, is what sparked the separation, he insists. Walt buys his explanation and momentarily turns against his mom, but Frank still prefers being around her. And his cat.

The split happens just as the boys struggle to create their own identities through artistic or athletic pursuits. Walt also discovers girls. First he develops interest in Sophie (Halley Feiffer). However, his parents' situation make him wonder how "committed" he wants to be with any female.

Then dad unwisely offers a flirtatious female student (Anna Paquin) a room in his ramshackle house. Her presence stirs the sexual appetites of both father and elder son. Meanwhile, Frank takes to smearing his semen on various objects at school.

Because Baumbach is drawing from life, the Berkmans do not behave as most movie parents do. Dad never bothers to challenge Frank's use of obscenities when playing sports because he is too busy using them himself. Mom never seems to call either offspring by his real name, preferring Chicken for Walt and Pickle for Frank.

Dad obsesses about finding parking spots near his house. Mom is careless in her love life, especially when she dates Frank's tennis coach (a funny performance by Billy Baldwin).

Baumbach recalls all this pain -- and even the humiliation of discovering one of your parents actually slept with a buddy's parent -- with humor rather than anger. The film is, perhaps, an act of forgiveness. The things that move his characters to rage and anguish bemuse him. He notices how everyone seems to have a talent for making bad situations worse. In looking back on his childhood, Baumbach seems to take comfort in this: It might have been a bitch, but he got a really good comedy out of it.

THE SQUID AND THE WHALE

An Original Media and Ambush Entertainment Presentation in association with Andrew Lauren Prods. of an American Empirical/Peter Newman-Interal Prod.

Credits:

Writer-director: Noah Baumbach

Producers: Wes Anderson, Peter Newman, Charlie Corwin, Clara Markowicz

Executive producers: Reverge Anselmo, Miranda Bailey, Greg Johnson, Andrew Lauren

Director of photography: Robert D. Yeoman

Production designer: Anne Ross

Music: Dean Wareham, Britta Philips

Costume designer: Amy Westcott

Editor: Tim Streeto

Cast:

Bernard: Jeff Daniels

Joan: Laura Linney

Walt: Jesse Eisenberg

Frank: Owen Kline

Sophie: Halley Feiffer

Lili: Anna Paquin

Ivan: Billy Baldwin

No MPAA rating

Running time -- 81 minutes...

Writer-director Reverge Anselmo has an eye for odd, telling details in this 1980s-set us-against-the-world romance. But the finely observed moments in "Stateside" accumulate little emotional power. The promise of something startling and compelling goes unfulfilled, and the arc of the central love story isn't interesting enough to sustain the drama.

Jonathan Tucker ("The Deep End") delivers a fresh, convincing portrayal of a well-to-do kid who finds himself stunned into growing up fast. As the girl he loves, Rachael Leigh Cook ("She's All That") brings a brooding restlessness to the more cliched role of a troubled but irresistible waif. The story's military angle might hit a current events nerve, and younger audiences likely will find the offbeat darkness of the saga and the Reagan-era setting exotic enough to drive modest boxoffice returns.

The Catholic schoolkid rebellion of Connecticut high school senior Mark (Tucker) and his friends, well captured here, implodes in a car crash with lasting repercussions. The school's head priest (Ed Begley Jr.) winds up in a wheelchair. Mark's precocious classmate Sue (Agnes Bruckner) loses not only her front teeth but her freedom: Her bitter mother (Carrie Fisher) tosses her into a state institution after learning of her sexual exploits. She also presses charges against Mark, who was behind the wheel.

Thanks to the influence of his wealthy father (Joe Mantegna), a compromise sentence places Mark in the Marine Corps rather than jail. Before he departs, he falls for Sue's slightly older hospital roommate, Dori (Cook), an actress/rock singer on leave from Hollywood. There's an urgency to their flirtation, an idiosyncratic poetry to their conversations and letters, all of which starts off bracing but becomes self-conscious.

It takes a while for it to sink in with Mark that Dori is being treated for schizophrenia. Most of the time Cook navigates the fine line that separates the role of a charismatic mental patient from the maudlin or cute. Dori is alternately exuberant, unresponsive, melancholy and thick-tongued from Thorazine. A therapist (Diane Venora) warns Mark that their intermittent get-togethers threaten her recovery.

When he isn't springing Dori from a halfway house, Mark is immersed in Marine Corps training, a crucible from which he believes he emerges a man. His silver-spoon status makes him the prime target for torment from his drill instructor (Val Kilmer), an oddball on a mission to do what "the mothers of America" cannot. In a strange way, the endless humiliation engages Mark, who never quite felt at home in the cavernous mansion he shared with his asthmatic father and dreamily grieving younger sister (Zena Grey), who is wont to traipse through the rooms in a mink that belonged to their recently deceased mother.

Such provocative character nuances are pushed to the periphery as the film falters in a wearying string of hospitalizations and furloughs. The well-played supporting characters serve mainly to orbit the young couple. While that might make sense for the adults, it's a shame that Bruckner's Sue is all but lost in the mix. Ultimately, so is Dori -- glimpses of her background or the drive that fueled her career apparently lost in editing. Her mother and uncle are dropped awkwardly into a scene in which they speak no lines and serve no discernible dramatic purpose.

Although the film's title refers to military slang for The Loved Ones left back home, Mark's experiences overseas, when his unit is deployed to Beirut, are compressed to a few lines of voice-over. Anselmo (a former Marine) brings the saga to a rushed conclusion, and the sense of two outsiders finding focus and solace in each other doesn't register with the necessary tenderness or force.

Unshowy wide-screen lensing and design elements effectively evoke the recent past, with vintage tracks by Elvis Costello and Rickie Lee Jones, among others, helping to heighten the nostalgia.

STATESIDE

Samuel Goldwyn Films

in association with Cinerenta and First Look Media

A Seven Hills Pictures production in association with Cinealpha KG

Credits:

Director-screenwriter: Reverge Anselmo

Producer: Robert Greenhut

Executive producers: Eberhard Kayser, Michele Berk

Director of photography: Adam Holender

Production designer: Mike Shaw

Music: Joel McNeely

Co-producer: Bonnie Hlinomaz

Costume designer: Cynthia Flynt

Editor: Suzy Elmiger

Cast:

Dori Lawrence: Rachael Leigh Cook

Mark Deloach: Jonathan Tucker

Sue Dubois: Agnes Bruckner

Mr. Deloach: Joe Mantegna

Mrs. Dubois: Carrie Fisher

Mrs. Hengen: Diane Venora

Father Concoff: Ed Begley Jr.

Senior Drill Instructor Skeer: Val Kilmer

Gina Deloach: Zena Grey

Running time -- 96 minutes

MPAA rating: R...

Writer-director Reverge Anselmo has an eye for odd, telling details in this 1980s-set us-against-the-world romance. But the finely observed moments in "Stateside" accumulate little emotional power. The promise of something startling and compelling goes unfulfilled, and the arc of the central love story isn't interesting enough to sustain the drama.

Jonathan Tucker ("The Deep End") delivers a fresh, convincing portrayal of a well-to-do kid who finds himself stunned into growing up fast. As the girl he loves, Rachael Leigh Cook ("She's All That") brings a brooding restlessness to the more cliched role of a troubled but irresistible waif. The story's military angle might hit a current events nerve, and younger audiences likely will find the offbeat darkness of the saga and the Reagan-era setting exotic enough to drive modest boxoffice returns.

The Catholic schoolkid rebellion of Connecticut high school senior Mark (Tucker) and his friends, well captured here, implodes in a car crash with lasting repercussions. The school's head priest (Ed Begley Jr.) winds up in a wheelchair. Mark's precocious classmate Sue (Agnes Bruckner) loses not only her front teeth but her freedom: Her bitter mother (Carrie Fisher) tosses her into a state institution after learning of her sexual exploits. She also presses charges against Mark, who was behind the wheel.

Thanks to the influence of his wealthy father (Joe Mantegna), a compromise sentence places Mark in the Marine Corps rather than jail. Before he departs, he falls for Sue's slightly older hospital roommate, Dori (Cook), an actress/rock singer on leave from Hollywood. There's an urgency to their flirtation, an idiosyncratic poetry to their conversations and letters, all of which starts off bracing but becomes self-conscious.

It takes a while for it to sink in with Mark that Dori is being treated for schizophrenia. Most of the time Cook navigates the fine line that separates the role of a charismatic mental patient from the maudlin or cute. Dori is alternately exuberant, unresponsive, melancholy and thick-tongued from Thorazine. A therapist (Diane Venora) warns Mark that their intermittent get-togethers threaten her recovery.

When he isn't springing Dori from a halfway house, Mark is immersed in Marine Corps training, a crucible from which he believes he emerges a man. His silver-spoon status makes him the prime target for torment from his drill instructor (Val Kilmer), an oddball on a mission to do what "the mothers of America" cannot. In a strange way, the endless humiliation engages Mark, who never quite felt at home in the cavernous mansion he shared with his asthmatic father and dreamily grieving younger sister (Zena Grey), who is wont to traipse through the rooms in a mink that belonged to their recently deceased mother.

Such provocative character nuances are pushed to the periphery as the film falters in a wearying string of hospitalizations and furloughs. The well-played supporting characters serve mainly to orbit the young couple. While that might make sense for the adults, it's a shame that Bruckner's Sue is all but lost in the mix. Ultimately, so is Dori -- glimpses of her background or the drive that fueled her career apparently lost in editing. Her mother and uncle are dropped awkwardly into a scene in which they speak no lines and serve no discernible dramatic purpose.

Although the film's title refers to military slang for The Loved Ones left back home, Mark's experiences overseas, when his unit is deployed to Beirut, are compressed to a few lines of voice-over. Anselmo (a former Marine) brings the saga to a rushed conclusion, and the sense of two outsiders finding focus and solace in each other doesn't register with the necessary tenderness or force.

Unshowy wide-screen lensing and design elements effectively evoke the recent past, with vintage tracks by Elvis Costello and Rickie Lee Jones, among others, helping to heighten the nostalgia.

STATESIDE

Samuel Goldwyn Films

in association with Cinerenta and First Look Media

A Seven Hills Pictures production in association with Cinealpha KG

Credits:

Director-screenwriter: Reverge Anselmo

Producer: Robert Greenhut

Executive producers: Eberhard Kayser, Michele Berk

Director of photography: Adam Holender

Production designer: Mike Shaw

Music: Joel McNeely

Co-producer: Bonnie Hlinomaz

Costume designer: Cynthia Flynt

Editor: Suzy Elmiger

Cast:

Dori Lawrence: Rachael Leigh Cook

Mark Deloach: Jonathan Tucker

Sue Dubois: Agnes Bruckner

Mr. Deloach: Joe Mantegna

Mrs. Dubois: Carrie Fisher

Mrs. Hengen: Diane Venora

Father Concoff: Ed Begley Jr.

Senior Drill Instructor Skeer: Val Kilmer

Gina Deloach: Zena Grey

Running time -- 96 minutes

MPAA rating: R...

Rachael Leigh Cook and The Deep End's Jonathan Tucker are set to star in the independently financed drama Stateside from writer-director Reverge Anselmo and First Look Media. Additionally, Agnes Bruckner, Carrie Fisher and Ed Begley Jr. are in talks to round out the cast. "Stateside" is about a rich, rebellious teenager (Tucker) who -- while on leave from the Marines -- falls in love with a young rock star (Cook) who is stricken with a mental illness. Robert Greenhut and Bonnie Hlinomaz are producing the film, which will shoot in North Carolina and New York beginning Nov. 9.