Funny, How?
Adam Sandler is seriously good again in The Meyerowitz Stories (New And Selected). Director Noah Baumbach and stars Sandler, Ben Stiller, Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson tell Total Film how they turned personal anguish into a warm, witty and wonderful Ne
Ido hear about Punch-Drunk [Love] a lot when I walk around,” shrugs Adam Sandler, offering Total Film a grape. “People talk to me about it and I’m proud of that movie, but I know PTA did all of that one. Just like this one: I’m proud to be in it, but any compliment I get, I say, ‘Noah told me to do that.’” Pausing, he smooths down his rather natty moustache and tosses another grape into his mouth. “I love being in this movie, it’s a good feeling, but I can’t count this will come my way every day.”
Sandler is sitting in the Carlton Hotel in Cannes, bathing in the sunlight streaming through the open windows and the critical plaudits that have met his awards-worthy (yes, you read that correctly) performance in Noah Baumbach’s comedy-drama of familial dysfunction, The Meyerowitz Stories (New And Selected). Plonked in the seat next to him is co-star Ben Stiller, a man who can count on these kind of movies coming his way, given The Meyerowitz Stories marks his third collaboration with indie darling Baumbach, after 2010’s Greenberg and 2014’s While We’re Young. “I’m just grateful that Noah hires me,” he grins, sapphire eyes fixed in a Blue-Steel gaze. “Seriously – to get a call from a director like that, someone you really admire… He said, ‘Look, I really see Matthew in a certain way and there’s a reason I want you to play him.’ And it had to do with a lot of personal stuff. Then it made sense to me. Making it, it made sense to me more.”
In The Meyerowitz Stories, Stiller’s Matthew and Sandler’s Danny are rival half-brothers. The former is a wealthy LA accountant, the latter divorced and out of work but a great dad to his 18-year-old daughter Eliza (star-in-the-making Grace Van Patten). Both, however, shrink in the shadow of their passive-aggressive father Harold (Dustin Hoffman), a retired professor and sculptor of minor reputation. And yet they must allow his darkness to once more blot their lives when they return home to organise a retrospective of his work, only for Harold’s health to take a turn for the worse.
If that sounds like a downer, it’s not. Baumbach’s gift, evidenced throughout his 22-year career, is to study themes of family angst, inter-generational conflict, ageing, artistic endeavour and notions of success with oodles of levity shuffled into the agony. The Meyerowitz Stories is Baumbach’s best since 2005’s The Squid And The Whale. It’s also his most accessible film to date. And it all started with his knowing he just had to cast Sandler and Stiller as brothers.
“I had lunch with them. I didn’t know what I was going to write, but we talked about how it would be exciting for them to play brothers,” says Baumbach later that day, his tailored dark suit and crisp white shirt offset by foppish hair. “The only thing I came away from that lunch with, besides that, is they should fight physically at some point. It’s just funny.” He pauses – one of many – to arrange his thoughts, then voices them at a furious clip. “So I wrote it with Ben and Adam in mind, but the father I was forming, inventing, was almost like an imaginary guy. He was inspired by people I know and different aspects of different people. But as soon as I finished, I thought, ‘I gotta get Dustin Hoffman.’”
No surprise there – the two-time Best Actor-winner is not only one of our finest living thesps, but many of his movies take place in Baumbach’s home city of New York, meaning he’s always been a favourite of the writer/director. Today, as ever, the diminutive dynamo is in spirited form. Eighty years young, he enters the room having grown two inches courtesy of his grey-white spiked hair, sits, rises, changes chairs, sits, gets up to close the window, sits, grins. “In some respects, it is about Noah’s father, and he felt I should be playing the
part,” he begins. “I wasn’t sure why until we met. We told stories about our fathers, saying that’s my father, and that’s my father, so it’s a combination of the two of us. Because yes, both our fathers were failures. It was painful to be a part of it.”
This is the thing about Baumbach’s movies: they often ransack his own life. His studies at Vassar College were the subject of his first film, Kicking And Screaming, while his parents’ separation formed the basis of The Squid And The Whale. His mother and his father, Georgia Brown and Jonathan Baumbach, were writers and film critics, so it’s hard not to conclude that the mixture of (exasperated) love and veiled toxicity that informs the father-son relationships in The Meyerowitz Stories isn’t art imitating life.
“We’re all in the shadow of our parents in one way or another,” says Baumbach. “Even if it’s benign rule, they’re the authorities, and that’s another thing the movie is about.”
He does point out that his father “has been incredibly supportive and loves that
I make movies, because he loves movies”, but there’s no doubting just how personal this tale is. Emotional authenticity, in fact, is so important to Baumbach that he expects it of his cast, too. He didn’t just want Sandler and Stiller because they’re two of Hollywood’s premier funnymen, but because they’ve both also been through the father-in-hospital experience. “We talked about our parents getting older, and losing our parents,” says Stiller. “And about having kids. It’s not necessarily literal, but I grew up in a showbiz family [his parents are actors/comedians Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara], so, in a way, the work was the religion, the commitment. My dad was not Harold, but some version of it.” What’s especially fascinating about Baumbach’s movies, though, is that he guards every word of his dense script (the 110-minute The Meyerowitz Stories ran to 165 pages – as much dialogue as you’d normally find in a three-hour film), refusing to let his actors alter a single syllable to fit more comfortably in their mouths. It would seem to undercut Baumbach’s quest to overlap reality and fiction – Stiller says it means, “You can’t make the character more like yourself” – but then goes on to explain just why it works so well. “You have to become more like the character. And then you have to figure out what parts of you relate to what you’re saying. That causes you to dig a little deeper.”
“Some of the speeches were pretty big,” remembers Sandler. “And I was like, ‘Oh God, I don’t want to let this
guy down – I gotta learn this.’
And I couldn’t remember them for a while.” Rather than learn his chunks of dialogue by a day, or even a week, at a time, he went all-in and learned the entire script before shooting began. “I had to,” he laughs. “That was being scared.”
Asked if he’s perhaps a little, shall we say, precious, over his creation on the page, Baumbach is unapologetic. “There’s a rhythm in the dialogue and it almost doesn’t work if they don’t do it exactly,” he says. “It doesn’t mean they don’t bring so much life in themselves to it; I mean, that’s what you hire them for. But it is almost like music, and if you play a note wrong, you hear it. And there’s a lot of choreography – long takes and moving shots. I’m often shooting four pages in one shot, so it’s not only getting the right dialogue but getting it at the right time. I do a lot of takes. With Dustin, I rehearsed for months. He was very interested in the musicality of it,
and he’d like me to say it to him. Not every actor is like that, but he wanted a line reading. It gave him the notes.”
Later in the afternoon, Total Film sits down with Emma Thompson, who plays Harold’s second wife Maureen. The topic of the script comes up immediately, as well it might given Thompson herself is an Oscar-winning screenwriter. “Language is very important to me because I was brought up by my dad who was self-taught, so language, words, putting them together, was really, really important. You listen to Harold, the way he talks about those boys and the passiveaggression of all those words he uses: ‘Matthew used to do this…’ and ‘You tried that…’ Lots and lots of words but the effect is talking about the children without lifting them in any way.”
Such are the rib-tickles and gutpunches delivered by The Meyerowitz Stories that you can be sure it will speak the language of the Academy come Oscar-ballot time. Unless, that is, the industry revolts because the finished film was picked up by Netflix, still viewed by many as the enemy.
Let’s hope not. Its limited theatrical run should help smooth any ruffled feathers, and it would be an act of cruelty to rob Sandler, Stiller and Hoffman (in his best role for 20 years) of their deserved acting nods. Likewise Baumbach for blending his signature particularity with a newfound populism. Not that he seems to care… “Netflix is incredibly supportive and, I know, wants all those things,” he says. “But… look, it always feels good if someone gives you a pat – it can’t not, really – but I’m not making movies for any kind of award except to keep making them the way I’m making them. I do really feel lucky to be able to do exactly that, the way I want it. I’ve got to make movies that are personal to me, uncompromised. That’s remarkable.”
‘i knew the brothers should fight physically, it’s just funny’ NoAH BAuMBAcH