The 2005 movie Jesse Eisenberg never wanted to release: “It actually kind of made me depressed”
Now also known for his directing, it wasn’t until Jesse Eisenberg‘s gripping performance as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network that he started being taken seriously.
He made his TV debut in 1999 on the teen drama series Get Real, before graduating to movie roles, and one such opportunity came in 2005, when he was still in his early 20s, with Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale, where he played Walt Berkman, the 16-year-old son of Jeff Daniels’ Bernard and Laura Linney’s Joan. When his parents announce that they are divorcing, it leaves him and his little brother Frank, played by Owen Kline, to navigate their strange new reality.
To celebrate the film’s 20th anniversary, Eisenberg and the rest of the cast spoke to Vanity Fair about their memories of making the project, and according to the former Walt, The Squid and the Whale had a profound effect on him and many of the people who saw it.
“People would come up to me on the street and tell me about their parents’ divorce,” he recalled, “It actually kind of made me depressed… I started playwriting right after that, and I just wanted a sense of agency over being in good things. The trap of being in a good thing when you’re really young is that it was probably luck. So I guess another thing that movie did was [making me] really want to do my own stuff, because I felt like it was a total fluke that I got into it.”
As you might have expected, The Squid and the Whale was inspired by Baumbach’s own experiences growing up, whose parents, much like Bernard and Joan, were also writers who struggled to balance their careers with their home lives and divorced in the 1980s, the decade in which the film is set, against the backdrop of the same New York City that plays host to the fictional events.
Divorce is a topic that clearly resonates with Baumbach, as he would explore it once again in his Oscar-nominated movie Marriage Story.
Separations and the ending of relationships have been subjects that have served filmmakers pretty much since the medium was invented. From recent comedies like The War of the Roses to heart-wrenching dramas such as Kramer vs Kramer, the topic can be interpreted in a number of different ways; for instance, the breakdown of Sofia Coppola and Spike Jonze’s marriage famously led to the production of drastically different viewpoints in Coppola’s Lost in Translation and Jonze’s Her.
The Squid and the Whale is a truly extraordinary film that gives real weight to one of life’s most troubling trials, so it’s no wonder that it connected with so many people, as it plays with emotions that everyone can relate to.
It might have made Eisenberg depressed for a while, but hopefully, he is now able to see the silver lining in the beautiful piece of art it really is.
