Baumbach's Middle School Years.
A post-apocalyptic beach somewhere in a Lars von Trier film. We watch a bunch of awful human beings interact for a stretch, every once in awhile focusing on a bug flying into someone's ear or a dead rat at the bottom of a pool or a gutted pig falling onto a dirty kitchen floor... shit that can only make you feel sick, and no sum exists for the experience. Scenes are short, punctuated riffs on a diseased family and the film rots eternally -- The Squid and the Whale from Shadow-Shadow Earth, with familiar parallels to Spanking the Monkey, complete with the non-ending. Without help from Baumbach's normally on-point dialogue save for the immortal "You shit in your shoes and then you fuck 'em," there's very little reason to sit through it. Nicole Kidman is amazing in it and Jack Black gets to expand his acting palette slightly, but honestly, Baumbach is the person who probably got the most out of it, finally achieving sweet revenge on real life analogs by making their dirty laundry public. It is high time he took his own mother to task after all that weird incestuous shit in the last movie, but goddammit, could he have left us out of it?
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