Recently I found myself in a cultural wasteland of a place with time to kill. I was stuck for an evening at a friends house who didn’t read, had little interest in music and no cable TV. As I had an evening to kill whilst they were out, with no books to peruse and no music to play, I resigned myself to the fact that I would have to find something from the limited TV choice to fill the time. The best of a bad selection was Meet the Parents, so I thought that I would share my pains, sorry, thoughts with you. The first thing to say is sort of a disclaimer in defence of the film and to balance slightly the review that will follow, as Im sure you have worked out by now that it wasn’t my cup of tea at all, did the title above give you that impression perhaps. Humour doesn’t often travel across the Atlantic very successfully. Sure some stateside productions such as Friends, Frasier and Scrubs have gone down a storm in ’’dear old blighty’’ and similarly Monty Python and Benny Hill for example have been well received in the ’’colonies’’ but by and large the humours of Britain and the United States remain fairly exclusive to each other. I accept that that is a big generalisation and also that this review will be fairly biased (as I am English) but I will try to be as fair as I can.
The basic premise is this, Gaylord ’’Greg’’ Focker (a name which in itself says something about the sophistication of the film) is settling into a comfortable relationship with Pam Byrnes, so comfortable in fact that he wants to pop the question. Before he does so he is awakened to the fact that to win her families approval he should take the old fashioned route and ask the father of his intended for his permission. This results in a weekend at the family residence where Greg causes mayhem and embarrassment all round as he tries and fails to impress the family. That really is the plot and although less is often more, as they say, in this instance the saying does not hold true. The series of events that comprise the body of the film are fairly predictable and full of cliché and have been used in films for the last hundred years, ever since Chaplin first fell in love with a flower seller or Harold Lloyd fell off of a roof. The punch lines are that predictable that you not only see them coming but you can see them getting on a bus 14 miles up the road. Greg played by Ben Stiller, is the archetypal ’’beneath the standards that the family expect’’ character and plays it with all the obvious sympathy and self pity that you expect. Only Robert De Niro as the overbearing father manages to pull something out of his character, but compared with his past achievements I doubt that this is a role that was taken on for anything more that money to pay the bills. The script is weak the jokes forced and unoriginal and the other actors unmemorable. This has all been done better and funnier before. If anyone can remember Norman Wisdom who based a whole career on just such a character, then they may agree with me that he had more humour in one finger that this film has in its whole body.
Although it may sound like Im reading too much into this but the film smacks a bit of anti-semitism. Instead of the Jew-doctor, Stiller plays a nurse who is belittled by `real’ doctors. Instead of the banker powerbroker, we have Stiller easily ridden by the CIA guy (incidentally a John Bircher type to judge from his bedtime reading. For those who don’t know, the book DeNiro is reading is perhaps the most influential creed on `global Jewish conspiracies’ in the post-war US.) His predecessor and still competitor for the girl is a devout Christian, in fact every other character seems to be that wholesome church going, successful, humourless, middle class American and a WASP to boot. He is bested by a cat, his name is derided and shrewdness, that Jewish mainstay, is replaced by spinelessness and incompetence and his bumbling destroys an altar. There is too much underlying religious iconography here to be coincidence.
All in all for me the film did not justify its existence or even the time spent invested in it by the viewer. Next time I spend time looking after someone else’s house, I will take a book.