The ‘Bad Dad’ Crux: On New Jonathan Baumbach

When I first saw The Squid and the Whale, I—a child of the 1980s, a child of divorce, a city child—saw a lot I recognized. Noah Baumbach’s 2005 semi-autobiographical film chronicles the breakup of a marriage in Brooklyn in 1986, and how its two children grapple with a way of new understanding their parents. It wasn’t an identical map—what ever is?—but it hit a few notes I hadn’t really ever heard outside my own life. (My brothers and I spent so many coll