Complex relationship film. Parents and children, husband and wife, brother and brother, in the main, but supplementarily wife and lover, male professor and female student, older boy and new girlfriend, among others. The uncommon specificity as to time and place and cultural milieu -- 1986, Brooklyn, the bourgeois intelligentsia -- is to some extent a limiting factor but more so an animating factor. These people live and breathe. (Or, in view of the time, lived and breathed.) The parents, the husband and wife, are respectively a has-been "serious" novelist, now a musty academic, and a soon-to-be first novelist, presently excerpted in The New Yorker, and to make matters worse the wife's wing-spreading encompasses an occasional affair. When the couple try a joint-custody separation, the older boy sides with his aggrieved father, while the younger boy, barely into puberty, sides with his mother. Though well played by the sagely bearded Jeff Daniels, with his outer show of cultivation and his undertow of savagery, the character of the father is seen as a bit of a caricature; and though likewise well played by the cosmetic-free Laura Linney, the mother is seen more distantly, less distinctly. But the characters of the children are unqualified successes, especially the older one, whose age, by no mere coincidence, closely matches that of writer-director Noah Baumbach at that same period. The hunched shoulders, the sniffy nose, the sleepy eyes, the shrugging speech of Jesse Eisenberg capture perfectly the role-playing pretentiousness of the young, and the damning details of intellectual laziness all throughout the script complete the portrait. The younger brother, played under a cloud of moroseness (with passing squalls) by Owen Kline, registers as a total original, a self-proclaimed philistine, after careful consideration of Dad's disdainful definition ("Someone who doesn't care about books or interesting films"), and no less pretentious, in his inverted snobbery, than his faux-cultured older brother. This painfully funny film, put simply, is a comedy of character, a human comedy. And while the filmmaking itself is nothing special, the not too jiggly hand-held camera does achieve, in its positioning and its movement, a sort of natural rapport with the humans, an easy congeniality, a Frenchified nonchalance. William Baldwin, Anna Paquin. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd