Everybody thinks their family is unique, and everybody thinks their family is fucked up.
Sure, everyone’s family might technically be unique, but zoom out far enough, and nobody’s special: All your sweet grandmothers and tow-headed children blur into everybody else’s sweet grandmothers and tow-headed children. And sure, zoom in close enough, and just about every family is fucked up—as fucked up, that is, as every other family.
So there’s the trap that most family dramas and comedies fall into: Assuming that because their characters are wacky or clever, or because they have fucked-up relationships, audiences will care. That’s rarely the case: Audiences already have their own families to care about. Getting them to invest in a fictional one requires something else: a humanistic eye for detail, or a subtle sense of what it is about families that makes being trapped inside one equally attractive and repulsive.
Most filmmakers don’t have that eye or that sense. Noah Baumbach does.
