Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney play husband and wife Bernard and Linda Berkman. They live in Park Slope in Brooklyn. Both are PHDs in their forties. Bernie has had a couple of novels published and teaches at a local college. His wife apparently stays home with their two boys.<br /><br />The dilemma of the two boys, Walt, roughly 15, and Frank, 11, is that their folks are breaking up and they aren't making it easy on their two kids. In fact, they're making it very hard.<br /><br />There will be two homes, and each kid will switch to the other parents house each day. It is never discussed but that means the two boys never get to live together. The screenplay never even presents this as a problem for the two boys.<br /><br />Bernie immediately strikes the audience as totally selfish and self-serving, and his oldest son Walt is his totally naive acolyte. When Bernie says Kafka's Metamorphosis is the ultimate book, Walt peddles the same stuff to a potential girlfriend. His high school counselor detects instantly that he has not read the book or any of the others he claims knowledge of. But Bernie develops self-serving alibis for Walt, like he does for himself, which is probably why Bernie's career as a novelist ended in his twenties.<br /><br />The two parents are mostly unaware their kids are falling apart emotionally. Frank is still a kid but he has begun masturbating in elementary school and wiping the residue on selected girls' lockers. His brother has presented a song to an audience at a high school talent contest as his own, when it is really the work of a famous member of a rock group.<br /><br />Walt is having trouble at Dad's too. Bernie has mostly resisted the potential groupie students in the literature courses he teaches. But then he finds out about the affairs Linda has been having with men in the neighborhood, even the kids' lame tennis teacher Ivan, played by William Baldwin.<br /><br />Bernie invites one of the more forward groupies at the college to live temporarily at the house. Walt has a high school girl roughly his own age he is working on, but his father's student is starting to rouse him too.<br /><br />Meanwhile, Frank, though only 11, has begun to drink beer and whiskey, and both kids swear and use foul language in front of both their parents. The key thing here is the two boys are losing it more each day and all Bernie can do is try and poison Walt against Linda. Linda too is unaware of the disintegration of her two boys. She's got a career to run.<br /><br />It all comes to a head when Walt confesses to the school counselor that he used to like his mother some when they watched Robin Hood together on television, and when she reassured him after he saw the picture of an enormous whale swallowing the squid at the Museum of Natural History. He liked her before his brother Frank was born. A light bulb goes off in the heads of the audience but the school counselor still looks a little clueless.<br /><br />Bernie is now so out of it with loss, he comes to Linda's house and asks if she would consider having him back. Linda laughs at this but the kids, both of them present, begin to wise up to the mendacity of their father and the new emerging confidence of their Mom. While Bernie's career is in limbo, Linda publishes a novel Bernie warned she would never be able to complete, and gets a short story published in the New Yorker.<br /><br />Bernie's behavior is transparent to the audience throughout the movie. He is a total user, but Frank has sided with his mother and Walt with his Dad.<br /><br />I was laughing at Bernie and Linda, mostly Bernie, though Linda has many moments too. The two parents were letting their kids regularly insult them, but when 15 year old Walt calls his mom a bitch, even Linda is alarmed and complains. This is when the two kids start to realize their parents particularly Bernie, have clay feet. Walt stops listening to his father, though Bernie has collapsed in the street from something and has had to be taken to a hospital by ambulance.<br /><br />When the kids realize Bernie has been using them, the recovery is underway. Now that they know it isn't they who are screwed up, the two boys can begin to recover.<br /><br />The film was written and directed by Noah Baumbach, whose parents himself and his brother are the subjects of this true story. Jeff Daniels gives his best performance ever, Laura Linney is fearless as Bernie's distraught wife. The two young actors who play the sons come close to breaking the hearts of the audience toward the end. The film is not a tragedy, its a tragicomedy.