By Jesse Cataldo

Much like the spectacle of the car crash or the grisly romance of a crime scene, there’s a certain allure to watching a relationship disintegrate. Yet few films succeed in capturing the delicate subtlety of this situation better than The Squid and the Whale, a tale of a broken marriage and its resulting fallout in 1980s Brooklyn.

As we first meet them, Bernard (Jeff Daniels) and Joan Berkman (Laura Linney) are a pair of comfortable middle-aged intellectuals passing each other on the staircase of fame. He’s a formerly successful writer struggling to sell a new manuscript; she’s an up and coming author with a short story in The New Yorker. This doesn’t sit well with the Bernard, whose brutal competitiveness becomes evident early on in what becomes a violent game of family tennis.

Before long, the couple’s cozy Park Slope apartment is broken in two; she stays, he leaves, and they share joint custody of their two children, at least in theory.

Soon enough, a low-key civil war breaks out, with their two children accordingly choosing sides. Sixteen-year -old Walt (Jesse Eisenberg), an awkward pseudo-intellectual who hangs on his father’s every pithy opinion, lashes out at his mother for bringing a man into their house. His younger brother Frank (Owen Kline) becomes increasingly distanced from his father and before long the boys are sequestered in separate houses, discretely funneling disparaging remarks from one parent to the other.

The film, written and directed by Noah Baumbach and unmistakably produced by Wes Anderson, handles this struggle quietly, toeing the line between comedy and drama. Anderson’s style is everywhere, from to the musical choices, to the tone of humor tinged with inescapable sadness. But the film lacks the overt quirkiness that his films are steeped in. This makes it all the more realistic, aided by its impeccable sense of time and setting.

While never too ambitious, The Squid and the Whale is nearly perfect in a small, beautiful way, an effortlessly funny descent into the ruins of a family. that manages to be touching without being depressing.