`Meet the Parents” is a slightly frowsy movie with a funny edge — a nightmare comedy about a nervous urban guy plunged into the hell of a wedding weekend with his fiance’s rich, WASP-y parents.
It’s a situation right out of a Woody Allen film, a Philip Roth story or “The Graduate,” and the moviemakers play the outsider comic anxiety for all it’s worth. Nebbish hero Greg Focker (Ben Stiller) — who’s traveling to Long Island with his fiance, Pam (Teri Polo), to attend the wedding of her sister — gets jinxed by class and by culture. A Jewish male nurse in a citadel of establishment machismo, he’s trapped. Once he falls under the evil eye of Pam’s father, Jack Byrnes (Robert De Niro), he gets so lost in fear and nausea he barely makes a move without offending, insulting or injuring one of his potential in-laws.
Directed by Jay Roach of the Austin Powers movies, “Meet the Parents” is hilarious at its best, forced and monotonous at its worst. But though it has flaws, it also has Stiller as the hapless, prospective son-in-law, Greg Focker. And, even better, it has De Niro as Greg’s nemesis: the fiance’s father-from-hell Byrnes, a terrifying guy with, we learn, a terrifying job.
These two actors have a kind of genius for dark comedy: Stiller for suffering through crises and De Niro for creating them. And they’re well-matched here. Greg is a sensitive guy with a nasty streak; Jack a nasty guy with a sensitive side. When De Niro screws up his face into those priceless furrows of macho suspicion and contempt and Stiller reacts with one of his stricken, desperate twitches, they’ve turned themselves into comic archetypes: all the more effective because the fears, however wildly exaggerated, are recognizable and genuine.
At first, Greg suffers from simple cultural displacement. He’s asked to recite grace at dinner with the fiercely pious Jack and winds up babbling out the lyrics of “Godspell.” But his accidents steadily escalate into genuine catastrophes. From the moment when Greg inadvertently fires a champagne cork right into the fragile urn containing the ashes of Jack’s sainted mother to a climactic binge of unintentional destruction that sees him turning the Byrnes’ front yard into a sewer, nearly killing the family dog and almost burning down the house and the wedding party in it.
Love moves in mysterious ways — but Greg and Pam seem increasingly a mismatch. Why, we begin to wonder, does Pam love him so? Doesn’t she share any of the family’s apparent prejudices? Of course, there’s the example of another mismatch: Jack’s consummate meanness and mother Dina’s (Blythe Danner) blandly sunny goodwill. But, obnoxious as the thought may be, wouldn’t Pam be better off with her grinning, golden boy ex-boyfriend Kevin Rawley (Owen Wilson), so ridiculously successful, so outrageously favored by Jack?
The movie never gives us a very good reason — other than Pam’s word — because it never really shows us Greg’s good side. We identify with him because we have to, because he’s the only protagonist going and because many of us have suffered through nightmares like this. But after a while it all fits into the whole bad dream pattern. This is how Greg sees himself: an accident-prone outsider with an unintentionally lewd name, trapped in a household whose outwardly smiley condescension conceals a chilling hostility. When it’s working right, this movie is like comic book Kafka: “The Trial” turned into a deadpan family sitcom.
“Meet the Parents” is based on Greg Glienna’s Chicago-produced 72-minute comedy featurette of 1992: a darker piece, which went much farther. The earlier film got a good Tribune review. But this new version has been rewritten by Jim Herzfeld (“Meet the Deedles”) and John Hamburg (“Safe Men”) and then polished again to satisfy the star cast. Like many studio comedies, it’s an actor-tailored piece, which means that it’s not as acid or dangerous as its inspiration — even if it has a dangerous star in De Niro.
Robert De Niro, the King of Comedy?
Seventeen years ago, when De Niro, in Scorsese’s movie of that name, played eccentric, would-be standup comic Rupert Pupkin, kidnapping a late-night TV talk show host in a demented campaign to win fame and fortune, the title was ironic. Rupert was no king. And De Niro, thanks to directors Scorsese and Francis Coppola, was closer to the King of Drama, the new Marlon Brando. Like Brando though, De Niro loved to play comedy, and in “Meet the Parents,” he shows again how bizarrely good he is at the job.
It’s a weird performance. Like Brando again, he lacks a light touch. His comic roles (“Analyze This,” “Wag the Dog,” “Rocky and Bullwinkle”) tend to be dark and heavy, full of grimaces and glowers, his chin stiffening unnaturally and his mouth getting tight and hard. Some of De Niro’s great roles — Rupert or Johnny Boy in “Mean Streets” or the surly skip tracer in “Midnight Run” — are comic parts. But De Niro is less a comedian than a villainous straight man of genius. If he plays against a lighter, defter comic actor — a Billy Crystal or here, Stiller — he’s massively effective, great at setting up laughs.
Stiller, on the other hand, plays comedy with the total magic absorption with which De Niro plays drama. Stiller gets lost in the moment — and Greg Focker is a kind of existential comic. Danner does the mom with the same luminous intensity with which she does a Tennessee Williams play. Wilson creates another marvelous goofball. As for director Roach, he’s definitely crude, but his timing is neat and his jokes bountiful. He has an unerring sense of how far to push his gags. And though, like the Farrelly Brothers, one can fault him for overindulging his own love of bathroom humor, maybe this movie will cure him. “Meet the Parents” has the running toilet gag to end (or flush) them all.
“Meet the Parents” has lots of overdrawn or even dull moments. It scores almost all of its laughs out of extreme anxiety and embarrassment. It’s an exhausting comedy, with a theme — class and cultural hostility — that rarely gets ventilated in comedy or drama. Maybe that’s why the handling seems uncertain, the tone too monotonous. But, in the end, whenever the movie is about to go wrong, something happens to set it right — usually instigated by the coldly mean De Niro or the hot, nervous Stiller.
`MEET THE PARENTS’
(star)(star)(star)
Directed by Jay Roach; written by Jim Herzfeld, John Hamburg, based on the short film and screenplay by Greg Glienna & Mary Ruth Clarke; photographed by Peter James; edited by Jon Poll; production designed by Rusty James; music by Randy Newman; produced by Nancy Tenebaum, Jane Rosenthal, Robert De Niro, Roach. A Universal Pictures/DreamWorks Pictures release; opens Friday. Running time: 1:48. MPAA rating: PG-13 (sexual content, drug references and language).
THE CAST
Jack Byrnes ……………. Robert De Niro
Greg Focker ……………. Ben Stiller
Pam Byrnes …………….. Teri Polo
Dina Byrnes ……………. Blythe Danner
Linda Banks ……………. Phyllis George
Larry Banks ……………. James Rebhorn
