The Squid and The Whale **** out of ****

Perfectly walks the tightrope between wit and poignancy.

Parents screw kids up. Maybe a lot, maybe a little, and in every way imaginable, but it happens, just as surely as parents enrich and instruct their sons and daughters. Noah Baumbach's fictional memoir, "The Squid and The Whale," knows that, and treats its characters- based on his family - with love, yes, but scrutiny, too. It does not declare what parents should be, but it has strong convictions about what they shouldn't: It is a brilliant, vicious, magnetic, articulate picture about two brilliant, vicious, magnetic, articulate divorcees who inflict sublime pain on the two sons they share with a selfish kind of honesty better suited for the leather couch.

"Mom, stop. I don't want to hear that from you," says Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) to his mother Joan (Laura Linney) as she describes some long-ago affair in the back of a storeroom.

"I know," Joan says. " I talk like that sometimes." She doesn't mean she's going to stop.

Joan is a writer just beginning to find her voice with pieces in The New Yorker. Ex-husband Bernard (Jeff Daniels) is a novelist, although by 1986, when the story opens, his literary star has dimmed; manuscripts are wait-listed as he teaches creative writing. The screenplay quietly suggests the divorce is tied to the shifting fortunes in Bernard and Joan's careers; certainly 16-year-old Walt believes it, and blames his mother for her wilting loyalty. But Bernard is a competitive, jealous ass - the word was invented for such a man - obsessed intellectual mannerisms and poet-warrior masculinty. He takes a house on the other side of Central Park - the "filet of the neighborhood," he says - and the parents share Walt and 11-year-old Frank (Owen Kline), who prefers Joan.

Baumbach has a sad soul - he presents Frank as a kind boy quickly losing his innocence amidst two absent parents - and a wonderful ear. Surely his father, writer John Baumbach, is a partial inspiration for Bernard, but he populates "The Squid and The Whale" with smaller, distinct characters, includng Ivan (William Baldwin), the breezy tennis pro who moves in with Joan, and Lili (Anna Paquin), one of those foolish graduate girls trying on the vixen personality for a couple years. She and Walt both tail around Bernard waiting for the verbal scraps he mindlessly passes as wisdom. Both discover divorce makes pitiful men faster than it produces such women.

Bill Murray and Kevin Kline would have made good Bernards, and Jeff Bridges basically played the role in "The Door In The loor" - but Daniels is the fit. Burly, offhandedly musing in his lilting voice, Bernard's really a bit stupid, and Daniels' performance captures talent trapped in accolades past. His speech and manners points to a verbose, muscular writing that lost steam in the 1980s to the "alternative voices" literary movement of the sick, the abused, and the minority - the kind of culture that produced James Frey's multiple lies in "A Million Little Pieces." As he did with Hap in "Terms of Endearment," Daniels carves out sympathy for the diminished Bernard. And Linney, in an equally skilled performance, diminishes our sympathy for Joan, who indulges her awakening at the expense of her children. She is a shadow of the mother she once was, and maybe knows it. Eisenberg and Kline deliver Baumbach's lines like they know they're funny, although Eisenberg played a similiar role in Dylan Kidd's excellent "Rodger Dodger."

The four are fine independently, clever coupled together and excellent when in a quartet. Not all of these niche films with witty, urbane screenplays and and eccentricity work. Baumbach wrote and directed a few clunkers, in fact with "Mr. Jealousy" and "Highball." But here he has the cast, the back-of-his-hand knowledge and an aim beyond the ennui and insecurity of intelligence in America. He's directed a seriously funny picture, one of the best from last year.