A plum role for Adam Sandler? Yes, really
The Meyerowitz Stories
15 cert, 112 min
Dir Noah Baumbach Starring Adam Sandler, Dustin Hoffman, Ben Stiller, Grace Van Patten, Elizabeth Marvel, Emma Thompson, Candice Bergman, Rebecca Miller
Imagine digging around in the garden shed for the first time in years and finding a Picasso propped up against the wallpaper steamer. Watching Adam Sandler in The Meyerowitz Stories is a little like that. The star of Pixels and Grown Ups – and, to be fair, also Punch-drunk Love and Funny People – has been bad in so many awful films that when he’s terrific in a great one, it feels like both a revelation and a windfall: you can’t quite wrap your head around the fact all that talent has just been lying there all along, gathering cobwebs and dust.
Noah Baumbach’s new film, which arrives on Netflix today after a jaunt around the film festivals, gives Sandler his best role in an absolute age, but it’s one of many pleasures in this comedy about three generations of a semibohemian New York Jewish family wriggling through a knot of crises. Like Baumbach’s earlier work, it’s all sharp angles and prickly surfaces, but there’s warmth and bittersweetness here, too, along with a family tree that recalls Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums: one imperfect patriarch and three damaged adult kids, one of whom is played by Ben Stiller.
Sandler plays Danny, whose long spell out of work and subsequent divorce has left him defined purely in terms of his bloodline. He’s a fretful son to Harold (Dustin Hoffman), a silver-bearded sculptor who’s not ungifted, but not exactly successful either – as Danny drily observes, he may be “undiscovered for a reason” – and a doting father to Eliza (Grace Van Patten), his 18-year-old only child who’s about to leave for college. Then there are Danny’s siblings: Jean (Elizabeth Marvel), who lives locally and works for Xerox, and Matthew (Stiller), a half-brother who flew the coop for Los Angeles years ago and now runs a successful wealth management firm.
The film’s basic shape, insofar as it has one, sees Danny, Jean and Matthew reconciling themselves with Harold’s imperfect fathering and approaching death, the prospect of which snaps grimly into focus thanks to a head injury the old man sustains while walking his poodle. But before this storyline even emerges, Baumbach spends almost an hour building up his characters, carefully rigging the tensions between them at various father-son dinners and outings in readiness for the choppy waters of its second half.
Oh, and there’s one further spanner thrown into the works with woozy aplomb: Emma Thompson’s blearily uproarious turn as Maureen, Harold’s new wife and a not-so-secret lush, whose previous lovers include Willem Dafoe and whose pet name for Harold is “the Dad”.
Each actor sticks to their own particular comic rhythm, but the joy of the film lies in watching them come together in rattling syncopation. There are strained moments here so acutely observed they make you flinch, but each one comes with a neatly judged topspin of silliness to maintain the slightly heightened manic mood. (I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film so brilliantly capture the way in which an extended spell in hospital can feel like a stay at a terminally downbeat holiday camp.)
Baumbach’s film understands that families are often held together by little more than memories, running jokes and improvised songs, but it’s not so sentimental to presume there aren’t times when it’s better for those bonds to stretch and snap.
Hoffman gives his funniest, most fully inhabited performance in years and Sandler, as we’ve already covered, is sensational. At last, amid the acres of rough on his Netflix page, we have a diamond.