Divorce: A Love Story

At 50, Noah Baumbach has made the best film of his career. A movie that intertwines with his own experience and cements his reputation as the auteur of splitsville. Jeff Gordinier talks to the director about love. Midlife, and 7he beauty and messes that come after.

- Jeff Gordinier

You can almost see the involuntary twitch of a chill coursing through him.

“It really was a childhood trauma for me,” Noah Baumbach says. “It has come up in therapy my entire life. It really messed me up. It messed me up.”

For an instant, you assume, understandably, that Baumbach is talking about the divorce of his parents, film critic Georgia Brown and experimental novelist Jonathan Baumbach, in the 1980s. But it’s not that simple. Baumbach is actually talking about going to see Invasion of the Body Snatchers—the creeped-out, dread-soaked 1978 version starring Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams and Jeff Goldblum—when he was a kid in Brooklyn, just as the torn seams of his parents’ marriage were becoming visible. “The notion of people seeming the same but not being what they present themselves to be was very scary to me,” Baumbach goes on. “I think I picked up on that through Body Snatchers. The concept of it just scared me so much... I was probably nine at the time.”

The idea of using a horror flick to process the toxic convolutions of divorce makes perfect sense when it comes to Baumbach, a die-hard movie freak who, at 50, has patiently built up a body of cinematic work that qualifies him as a poet laureate of marital strife. No, his directing career didn’t begin with 2005’s The Squid and the Whale (it got going a decade earlier with the slackers stuck-in-neutral tropes of 1995’s Kicking & Screaming, after which Baumbach got stuck in neutral for a spell), but a lot of people think of Squid as the movie in which a specifically Baumbachian view of the world really started to gel.