THE title might seem obscure and even pretentious, but it's actually the trigger to the narrative. As a small boy, Walt, now 16, was often taken by his mother to the Museum of Natural History in New York where he was struck by a permanent exhibit showing a pair of giant marine monsters locked in mortal combat.

This long-forgotten image becomes a metaphor . . . like a sort of Rosebud . . . for the deteriorating relationship between his writer parents Bernard and Joan, who have taken to using Walt and his 12-year-old brother Frank as pawns in their domestic warfare.

The Squid and the Whale is specifically set in 1986 at the time 36year-old writer-director Noam Baumbach was the same age as Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) and his own parents were breaking up. Walt's rude coming of age is a version of what happened to Baumbach.

The Brownstone Brooklyn house where the action is shot belongs to a childhood friend. Like Walt . . . who claims a Pink Floyd song as his own at a school concert . . . Baumbach too was a huge Pink Floyd fan. The school where the Squid is shot . . . in Super 16 rather than digital video to heighten the period feel . . . is Baumbach's old school. The family conference called by Bernard (Jeff Daniels) and Joan (Laura Linney) in the living room to announce to the boys that Bernard is moving out and that they are going to be shared out between them, spending one day with dad and the other with their mom, has a distinctly 1980s let'snot-lie-to-the-kids parenting ring.

Walt, who idolises his dad, of course blames mom for the break-up, even more so when she takes up with his tennis coach, whereas Frank wants to stay with her, partly because that's where the cat is too.

Bernard, a once successful novelist now reduced to acting clever before his creative writing students . . .especially the sexy ones . . . is oblivious to anyone's needs but his own. There's a particularly hilarious sequence in which, having dismissed Walt's first girlfriend as being "not my type" he then gatecrashes their date and ends up sticking her with the bill for her meal. Yet instead of finding the ridiculously opinionated Bernard obnoxious, it's impossible not to empathise with him . . . as Walt does . . .such is the warped humanity Daniels brings to the role, while the overly candid Joan . . . a beautifully hurt and vulnerable performance from Laura Linney . . . in her own way is just as selfcentred: she only seems the innocent party in comparison to his outrageous selfishness.

The Squid and the Whale, which is coproduced by Wes Anderson and explores territory close to his own with a similar deadpan impartiality, is playfully laced with metaphors . . . as befits a story about a literary family . . .

right from the opening tennis match in which father and son take on mother and son with the ball bouncing this way and that, an experience the boys are about to have in their disrupted lives.

Just as Sideways provided a breath of fresh air last year, The Squid and the Whale suggests that American cinema may indeed . . . as the Oscars suggested . . . be finding the courage to get up close and personal in the way true cinema should but too often doesn't. The pity is that yet again Daniels got passed over in the Oscar nominations. Some day he'll surely get the recognition his brilliance as a character actor deserves. Young Eisenberg as Walt picks up where he left off as the innocent on the loose in night-time New York in Roger Dodger. Like Baumbach, he's worth watching out for.