Daddy dearest
In Meet the Parents, Robert De Niro plays Jack Byrnes, doting father of Pam (Teri Polo) and loving husband of Dina (Blythe Danner), one of those bluff, towering, suburban masters of the house who rule with the smiling ease of a benevolent despot. It’s obvious that everything in his life is exactly the way he wants it, and because Jack is played by Robert De Niro, there’s an ominous feeling that somewhere in the past Jack won his domestic throne by right of conquest—that Jack’s wife and kids had to be shown who was boss, and it wasn’t a pretty scene.
Into this cozy nest walks Greg Focker (Ben Stiller), Pam’s boyfriend, who is trying to work up the nerve to propose. Greg soon learns that if he wants to join the Byrnes family, he’d better ask Jack’s permission before he says a word to Pam. So Greg accompanies Pam home to Long Island for her sister’s wedding, hoping to ingratiate himself with Jack and Dina and—I can scarcely believe I’m writing this in the year 2000—obtain Jack’s permission to ask Pam to marry him.
From the outset, Greg gets off on the wrong foot. He tries to tell Jack what he thinks Jack wants to hear, and he always seems to guess wrong—besides, there’s a wily glint in Jack’s eye that tells Greg nothing he says or does will be right. As it happens, one white lie has to be covered by another, and before Greg knows it things are completely out of hand. At the same time, to make things worse, Jack discovers a marijuana pipe that belongs to his own son, but the boy tells him it’s Greg’s. Rather than confront Greg, Jack gives him one of those is-there-something-you-want-to-tell-me speeches.
Meet the Parents depends on ridiculous misunderstandings the way a teen slasher movie depends on people walking into dark rooms or opening that closet door. If Jack and Greg would just sit down and talk to each other, everything would come clear and they might even wind up liking each other.
Eventually, of course, that’s just what they do. But first, director Jay Roach and writers Jim Herzfeld and John Hamburg have to pad the film with snowballing complications. The central section of the film—when Greg’s well-meaning deceptions come back to bite him and his own jittery neuroses lead to an overflowing cesspool, a runaway pet, and a backyard fire—spirals into exasperation, and Roach asks us to laugh uproariously at things that would make us rage or weep if they happened to us.
To be honest, I found myself laughing out loud more than once, mainly in the film’s first and third acts. Robert De Niro has a flair for comedy that he seldom gets to explore, and after 30 years of his brooding intensity, it’s still fresh enough to be surprising and disarming.
Stiller makes a good foil for De Niro—slack-jawed, slightly desperate, his eyes shifting about as if he were searching the sky behind De Niro looking for enemy aircraft. De Niro and Stiller turn Jack and Greg’s relationship into an excruciating cat-and-mouse game and a bizarre courtship ritual in its own right. “Interesting car, Greg; did you pick that color?” Jack says, and despite the offhand words, we know from his carnivorous gleam and Greg’s sweaty panic that there is no right answer.
While it’s a truism that all comedy has an element of sadism, it doesn’t necessarily follow that all sadism is funny. Meet the Parents becomes sadistic when it wanders away from the central thread of the interplay between Robert De Niro and Ben Stiller. Other characters, rather than being victims of the pissing contest between Jack and Greg, become innocent bystanders in the filmmakers’ drive to keep the contrivances of the plot wheezing along. Roach plays the action too straight, and it’s not funny; it sets your teeth on edge.
The film’s press materials say that Meet the Parents was based on a short film by comedian Greg Glienna, and a bloated short is exactly what it feels like. The best way to see it is to rent the video, watch the first half-hour, then fast-forward to the last half-hour. That way you’ll get the scenes in which De Niro and Stiller make it worth watching.