Noah Baumbach’s squid pro quo

Perhaps the key to understanding the work of Noah Baumbach, director of Kicking and Screaming, Mr. Jealousy, and now the autobiographical The Squid and the Whale, isn’t that, like the hero of his new film, he’s the son of divorced former film critics but rather that, though born and raised in Brooklyn and currently a Manhattan resident, he’s — well, let’s let him explain.

"I’m a huge Red Sox fan. You can trace it like some kind of lineage. My dad was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan. He grew up in Brooklyn, and then when they moved, he became a Mets fan. But he hated the Yankees, so I grew up hating the Yankees, and, when I was very young, liking the Mets. But the Mets were very bad back then. I wanted my own team, that was a way to distinguish myself, but I never was going to pick the Yankees, so I picked the Red Sox as the kind of Mets substitute. And the Red Sox, until last year, were much more heartache than the Mets were. Rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for Microsoft or something."

Perhaps these mixed loyalties contributed to his setting The Squid in 1986, the year the Mets beat the Red Sox in the World Series, though that event is never mentioned in the film. Instead the inspiration comes from a life-sized diorama in the Natural History Museum of the title undersea monsters in mortal combat. For Baumbach, the exhibit was so dreadful that he covered his eyes, yet he kept returning to it, accompanied by his mother. What was so terrifying and so irresistible?

"The whole thing of it, the geography of that room. You’ve got this giant whale [hanging] from the ceiling and these amazing dioramas all around it. But in the corner on the left, it really just looks black, maybe it’s not even a working exhibit, but the closer you get, the more it comes into focus and there’s this . . . there’s these bits of things, tentacles, eyes, teeth, and there’s something very frightening about it. But at the same time I was always drawn to that corner. It was always this terror and fun, participating with it, adding to it, and at certain times of my childhood I imagined there could be more than one squid. I would cover my eyes, and my mother would later retell the details to me."

In a way, it sounds like a fan’s approach to the typical Red Sox season. But Baumbach’s film is concerned with even more primal passions, and his concept altered when he saw Louis Malle’s Le souffle au cœur|Murmur of the Heart. It persuaded him not to shoot the film as told by a 30-year-old pondering his youth but from the point of view of the teenage hero.

So, does he think his film is as Oedipal as Malle’s?

"Well no one sleeps with their mom. I don’t know if you can get more Oedipal than that."

How about watching a film you made about your mother and father with your mother and father, who happen to be film critics?

"It took me until my third film to shake the analytical approach and come at filmmaking from a much more emotional standpoint. But they really loved the movie. They’re writers too, and they’ve written fiction about their parents. It’s not unfamiliar territory."

To return to more-familiar territory: Sox’ chances next year?

" It depends on the pitching . . . "

_PK