No Resolution?

I'll go ahead and bump this thread because after having just watched The Squid and the Whale for the first time, Frank's loose-ended sideplot turned out to be my biggest issue with movie.

Firstly, it's hard to buy into this reiterated argument that resolutions are somehow unnecessary; that the movie should be interpreted more as a vignette than a full-fledged story. Consdering Baumbach obviously tried to conclude Jesse Eisenberg's arch with that (heavily symbolic) closing scene, it was clear that the storyteller was illustrating a drama with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Unfortunately, all the scenes squarely focused onto Frank's pubescent shenanigans did not add up to a narrative substantive enough to fit that classic scriptwriting quota.

It's not that Frank's depiction is hard to 'get' because I certainly 'got' it: I got how his horrendous familial environment was taking its toll on his social skills and his budding sexuality; I got how his attachment to his mother and his resentment towards his father helped clue the audience into the less likable aspects of Jeff Daniels' character; I got how the scene where the cashew comes back out his nose was supposed to tell the audience 'Don't be too upset with him because this behaviour won't last too long'; and I got how he was ultimately finding a father figure within William Baldwin's character and was therefore discovering a comfortable home-environment to settle down at (i.e. his Mom's place). However, my problem was that, in lieu of the story's other subplots, all of Frank's escapades didn't meet an ends that amount to something that could have contributed to the film's progression.

What Baumbach could have tried, maybe, was have Frank work as a catalyst. After his parents are spoken to by the school-principal, they could have realized that their son needs some major counseling and thus have shifted their focus farther away from their own personal issues and more towards their children. But after they find out about their son's dirty habits, all that the parents argue about is their own personal troubles. Perhaps Baumbach was using Frank as a general statement against either joint custody or divorce in general, showing that such a decisions takes too much time and devotion away from the kids (especially during their more formative years). But again, I refer back to the movie's conclusion as an explicit indication that in spite of the film's essence as a 'vignette', character development was one of Baumbach's goals and - due to Frank's disappointingly underwhelming journey - was one where he came up short.

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