The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper (stranger_slog) wrote, @ 2017-10-11 14:17:00 |
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Everybody thinks their family is unique, and everybody thinks their family is fucked up.
Sure, everyones family might technically be unique, but zoom out far enough, and nobodys special: All your sweet grandmothers and tow-headed children blur into everybody elses sweet grandmothers and tow-headed children. And sure, zoom in close enough, and just about every family is fucked upas fucked up, that is, as every other family.
So theres 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. Thats 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 dont have that eye or that sense. Noah Baumbach does.
Baumbachthe guy behind The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding, Greenberg, Frances Ha, While Were Young, and, weirdly, Madagascar 3: Europes Most Wantedis the latest auteur to abandon the arthouse for Netflix. The Meyerowitz Stories is getting a theatrical release in 10 citiesSeattle isnt one of thembut for everyone else, itll pop up on Netflix, where the companys algorithm may or may not suggest it to you based on how many times you saw Frances Ha. Or Madagascar 3.
Even if Netflix doesnt think youll like it, Meyerowitz is worth searching for. Its got a great cast: Dustin Hoffman, Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler, Emma Thompson, and Elizabeth Marvel hold down the leads, with side characters played by the likes of Candice Bergen, Adam Driver, Judd Hirsch, and Sigourney Weaver. Its got Baumbachs sharp ear for dialogue, with its Manhattanite characters rambling and mumbling, shouting and interrupting. And its got a hard-to-describe feel about it: The feeling of people whore trying to do their best, and failing. The feeling of people who know they should care more about their relatives than they do. The feeling of simultaneous desperation and comfort. They feeling of family.
Baumbach introduces three siblings: Danny (Sandler), a loving dad whos lost now that his daughter is heading to college; Matthew (Stiller), a financially successful, emotionally pathetic neurotic; and Jean (Marvel), whose steady deadpan masks a hard-edged toughness. The only thing theyve got in common is their dad, Harold (Hoffman), whos either a great sculptor who never got his due or a mediocre sculptor who got exactly the due he deserved. Either way, hes cranky and bitter, with his cantankerous charm barely covering his incessant criticism of his children, his friends, and his ex-wife (Bergen). He rarely has an ill word to say about his current wife, Maureen (Thompson), but Maureens drinking isnt what any of the Meyerowitzes need.
If it sounds like a lot to track, it is: Baumbach throws us right into the Meyerowitzs family dynamics, with half-remembered resentments bubbling beneath awkward hugs.
Even as Baumbachs film gets wobbly toward the end, the cast holds it together. Over all of Adam Sandlers years of... well, being Adam Sandler, hes nailed a few unquestionably great performancesPunch Drunk Love, Funny Peopleand with Meyerowitz, he adds another, expertly balancing sentimentality and self-loathing. Stiller is similarly good: Tight-wound and earnest, hes the living embodiment of the stress that comes from caring too much about some things and too little about others.
But back to that ending: As Meyerowitz tacks on epilogue after epilogue, it loses its rhythm, as if Baumbach cant bear to say goodbye to his characters. But maybe thats the only way to end a movie like this one: The Meyerowitzes will go on, just like most families, and theyll still be fucked up, and theyll still keep trying. I keep thinking I know how to handle you now, Matthew tells Harold, but then I see you and get sucked into your shit all over again. And that, for better and worse, might be the most accurate description of family Ive heard in a while.