The Whale and the Squid

I watched a 1997 movie called the Whale and the Squid. I found it slow, lacks action and unclear about the message it is trying to portray. I read the articles about it and found out it was highly acclaimed. It made me think: what point I am missing when I watch a movie that the critics find interesting while I do not?

The answer was in the movie.

Besides the obvious plot that tries to highlight the impact of divorce onkids, I noticed it portrays the complex relationships between two social types: the Philistines and the Bohemians! In a brilliant twist, the director makes you take a stand. If you are a philistine, you take the stand of the mother/Frank and you see them as the normal people. If you are Bohemian, you will take the stand of the father/Walt. In his brilliance, the Director create the script to allow you to make your own judgement. Then is a sudden Twist, mixes up things when Walt switch sides and you discover the mother is Bohemian herself...

I am still contemplating on the final scene where Walt goes back his nostalgic memory where the mom had prominence and I am trying to figure it out! Is he trying to say that the nostalgic memories we carry are far more important than values we believe in? Or is that the mother care for pragmatic details about life if the core the we should focus on? What does the Squid and the Whale represent? The fear from fighting between the parents? How the mother can ease the fear of kids? The fight between species (in this sense the Bohemians and the Philistines?)

So, this slow boring movie turned out to hide brilliant instigators for us to think about life and ourselves. Brilliant.