Anna Paquin wouldn't touch Jeff Daniels without protective gear. Really, it's in her contract.

Divorce, intellectual style, is the subject of The Squid and the Whale, a more-bitter-than-sweet comedy that features neither squid nor whale. Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney play the couple that you spend the movie praying won’t get back together. He’s a novelist whose most successful days seem to be behind him; she’s been the supportive, behind-the-scenes presence but has recently become a literary darling in her own right.

Their kids, teenaged Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) and 10-year-old Frank (Owen Kline) quickly choose up sides in their parents disintegrating marriage. Walt worships his father, a man profoundly undeserving of admiration. Seriously, I wanted to smack Jeff Daniels really hard, which is a tremendous compliment to the performance. His Bernard is an intellectual snob who nonetheless finds time to watch “Three’s Company,” a petulant, self-absorbed man-child who is seemingly incapable of thinking of anybody’s feelings but his own. “Don’t be difficult,” is his catch phrase, which he uses whenever someone has an opinion or desire that differs from his own.

"Man, if we had one more brother we could be Hansen."

On the other hand, Laura Linney, normally one of my favorite actresses, is pretty colorless and bland here. I suppose that’s sort of the point of her character, but the performance felt awfully one-note, and there’s a scene where she has to laugh at an inappropriate moment that I think Linney fails miserably at.

Writer/director Noah Baumbach tells his semi-autobiographical story with dark, unsentimental humor. You may not like the characters any better by the end, but those who are capable of growth have achieved some.

Gorilla Pants rating: 3 out of 4 bananas