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Let me then take this moment to go on record
about my opinion of Ben Stiller movies:
I love 'em. Zoolander and
Dodgeball: Hysterical. Mystery Men and Keeping
the Faith: Very good. The Royal Tannenbaums:
Wow. Along Came Polly, There's Something About Mary:
Pretty damn good. Zero Effect: Grossly
underrated. But there are some I hate, Starsky and Hutch,
Your Friends and Neighbors, and the top of that list is Meet
the Parents. Now, Your Friends and Neighbors
angers me, but Meet the Parents is worse because it could
have been great, but it never really crawled its way
completely out of the egg. And as such was a
miscarriage. So it was with great trepidation that I
rented for my girlfriend, Meet the Fockers.
It's better. But that's it.
Rather than a movie with a storyline that moves forward to a
conclusive action or moment it is the latest in a string of
comedies that are basically two hour skit specials.
Like Anchorman (which I wasn't nuts about) and Starsky and
Hutch (which pissed me off), Meet the Fockers has a plot for
the sole purpose of attempting to unify an otherwise
unconnected series of set pieces. Thanks to the
addition of the great Dustin Hoffman and a woman I usually
despise, Barbara Strident, the set pieces end up working a
good deal of the time, countering De Niro's unfortunately
wooden, blocking character portrayal of the fiance's father.
Hoffman, truly a great actor manages to bring a softness to
Mr. Focker's character as a dad, that De Niro seems
completely unwilling to attempt for his Mr. Byrnes.
Yet it is the depth that makes Meet the Fockers superior to
Meet the Parents, elevating a few millimeters from merely
being a skit show like SNL or Mad TV. And as
a result, the best moments in the movie involve Striesand
and Hoffman. In fact really the only good ones.
Stiller does his There's Something About Mary performance
again, stuttering, silly, un-confident and De Niro is
Analyze This minus the Bronx accent. Blythe Danner is
really the only member of the Byrnes family that brings some
life to their skits, wondrous actress that she is.
Teri Polo has gotten more beautiful but is still as much of
a prop as she was before ("Could you move the wife a few
more feet into the shot, thanks"). And the plot?
Keeps going, and going, one set piece after the next,
painfully extending the film into a respectable length, to
the point of confounding logic: If truth serum makes
you tell the truth, why would you state something as fact
under it's influence, that you don't know to be true?
Whatever, as always the weakest part of the whole debacle is
De Niro's CIA career, a plot point which seemed to come so
far out of left field in part one, that it still seems to be
sailing way up and over from that very direction.
Damaged at it's conception, the Meet The Parents franchise
could have been Ben Stiller's best work and a true showcase
for Robert De Niro's comic talents, of which he has many.
But, from day one the creative view of the work was too
near-sighted and wasted away its comic possibility to merely
be a vehicle for Stiller "screw-ups". Had more love
and attention been poured into these two families and the
true comic potential of unlike families meeting, marriage
mix-ups and what it means to join two unlike things, Meet
the... could have been Stiller's meal ticket to comic
greatness. Instead, for some reason, it's merely a
meal ticket that America keeps buying. But that's
good, 'cause with the money Ben gets from this crap, maybe
he can keep making his good stuff. |
