DirectorNoah Baumbach’s films have a flavor all their own. He seems to be traversing the same terrain as Woody Allen -- Jewish intellectuals in Brooklyn -- but the two men’s films bear scarcely any resemblance to each other.

Baumbach’s male characters like to make up legends about themselves and, when these are exposed as delusions, to make up more legends. His female characters ignore the legends as long as they can, until the male is more or less flopping around like a fish on a dock, and then get on with their lives. Baumbach’s ladies are not so much ruthless or heartless as they are realistic.

“Kicking and Screaming” -- not the Will Ferrell vehicle -- dealt with the difficulties faced by recent graduates in leaving behind the enclosed, comfortable undergraduate community. “Mr. Jealousy” was a set of hilarious variations on the theme of one young man’s inability to accept that his lady love loves only him.

The characters in “The Squid and the Whale” are both younger and older than those of his first two films, who were all the same age, a cohort. Now we have an entire nuclear family, the Berkmans: Bernard and Joan (Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney), their two sons Walt (Jesse Eisenberg), 15, and Frank (Owen Kline), 12, together with four singles -- each trying, mostly unconsciously, to leverage out one of the Berkmans. Lili (Anna Paquin) is a worshipful student in one of Bernard’s writing seminars. Ivan (William Baldwin) is Frank’s laid-back tennis teacher -- in love with Mrs. Berkman, as a Restoration dramatist might put it. Sarah (Halley Feiffer) is Walt’s first official girl friend, and she counteracts the glib, cynical literary judgments Walt has taken from his father, with a sweet, generous reading of the books that Walt has just put down. Carl is Frank’s friend at school, and his influence is more assumed than examined.

The movie is about the break up of the Berkman marriage, and the story is told with more insight and less self-pity than I have seen in any other divorce saga. By focusing on the particular, the significant detail, Baumbach achieves a surprising universality, and the “Squid and the Whale” is an altogether remarkable motion picture. Rated R.

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