Jeff Daniels (center) plays the difficult patriarch, Bernard, in THE SQUID AND THE WHALE.

In THE SQUID AND THE WHALE, Jeff Daniels plays Bernard, a pompous creative writing teacher and novelist whose intellectual capabilities far outweigh his emotional maturity. A.O. Scott aptly describes his character as “the kind of man who can refer to Franz Kafka as ‘one of my predecessors’ and dismiss A TALE OF TWO CITIES as ‘minor Dickens’”. Bernard’s perception of himself and his two sons relies heavily on the success of their intellectual endeavors, as family dinners revolve around discussions of classic literature as if Bernard had never left his classroom that day.

Bernard’s difficult personality is one of the many factors contributing to his divorce with the aloof and complicated Joan (Laura Linney), also a writer and the mother of his children. Noah Baumbach wrote and directed this intense coming-of-age story that revolves around a divorce set in Park Slope, Brooklyn in the mid 80’s, told primarily through the perspective of Walt, their 16-year old son. Both hilarious and painful, the experience of watching the egos of Baumbach’s characters bounce off one another is much like reliving the time when we were first embarrassed or ashamed of our parents -- a profound moment in adolescence that often marks a transition into young adulthood. Baumbach's stories are about characters, and his characters are often all too real.

Baumbach's 2007 film MARGOT AT THE WEDDING.

Baumbach’s next feature was MARGOT AT THE WEDDING in 2007, another dysfunctional-family comedy/drama. The film disappointed some of the critics who had loved SQUID but believed that MARGOT had barrowed Baumbach’s signature “verbally violent” characters and turned them into cruel basketcases. Nicole Kidman stars as Margot, a successful and anxiety-ridden woman who brings her 11-year old son to visit her sister, engaged to a man that Margot despises. Here, Baumbach pushes family drama to its extreme: while relatives slap each other in the face, the hostility of their physical assaults is far less threatening than their biting, passive-aggressive remarks toward one another.

The director has noted in interviews that the first question journalists tend to ask him is whether his films are autobiographical. Like the two boys of SQUID, Noah was born in Brooklyn, New York to writer parents who divorced when he was 14 – thus, it is difficult not to make the assumption. "Somebody could easily go through and link everything to different points in not just my family, but people I know - but I don't even really care,” he once said. “For me, the movie is a protection - a completely reinvented film." Perhaps a number of Baumbach’s fans ask this question simply because they identified all too much with the broken families of his films.

Baumbach also attended my alma mater, Vassar College, and graduated in 1991 long before I arrived. Incidentally, his first film, KICKING AND SCREAMING, centers on the lives of four young men who graduate from a left-wing, northeast liberal arts college and refuse to move on with their lives. Autobiographical? Isn't everything? No. Maybe. Who cares?