Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
Estranged, emotionally overburdened families forced to reconnect and confront one another after a parent has a medical crisis is a staple of cinematic narrative, played for laughs, tears, or some cagey combination of both. But in the hands of Noah Baumbach, this cliche-laden vehicle is thoroughly revitalized by the writer/director’s insistence on character above all else. Avoiding pat emotional encounters, and anything remotely
resembling a Hallmark moment, Baumbach stretches the form into a literate, oddly absorbing bittersweet comedy in The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected).
He has also broken the film down structurally in ways both compelling and rewarding. We first meet wayward son Danny (Adam Sandler), trying fruitlessly to park his Subaru wagon near his father’s Manhattan brownstone. He’s driving with his 18-yearold daughter, Eliza (Grace Van Patten), about to shove off to college at Bard, where Danny’s sculptor father, Harold (Dustin Hoffman), has recently retired as a professor.
Danny, once considered something of a musical prodigy, arrives at his father’s townhouse at a crossroads: His marriage is ending, his career, which he happily subsumed in order to be a house-husband, is non-existent, and his beloved daughter, with whom he shares a sparkling, honest relationship, is finally striking out on her own.
Harold, meanwhile, now living with his fourth wife, Maureen (Emma Thompson),
a well-meaning but boozy woman adorned in jangly jewelry and prone to making horrific, exotic dinners of barely cooked shark, forever stews about his legacy as an artist, taking offense at the slightest refutation, and endlessly envious of his former colleagues, such as L.J. (Judd Hirsch), who has become such a venerated artist he gets his own retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Meanwhile, Danny’s sister, Jean (Elizabeth Marvel), down from Rochester, where she does something no one quite understands at Xerox, is every bit the unhappy, unfulfilled ghost that Danny is. It is their half-brother, Matthew (Ben Stiller), a successful wealth manager moved to L.A., who has always been his father’s favorite, even after changing coasts to get away from the old man. When Harold suddenly takes ill and is put into a doctor-induced coma, the clan has to rally together around him, even as the grind of age-old hurts and emotional inequities continually rise up to engulf them.
As the title suggests, the story is broken into jagged sections — we have a piece led by Danny, one led by the beleaguered Matthew, and so
forth, a prop that works fairly well to examine the family dynamic from multiple angles. Danny, a sweet man, toothless in ambition, and fearful of actualization (he compares performing live on stage to walking barefoot over broken glass to get a milkshake), is a depressingly sad sack. Vivacious Eliza, who sends the family jarringly provocative short films she’s making on campus, is more his parent than his child — at one point, when he calls her morosely on the phone, she detects his unhappiness and tries to root it out of him, promising to check on him in the morning. Matthew, meanwhile, as financially successful as he might be, has always suffered under his father’s watchful gaze (as Harold puts it, he threw in the towel with Danny and Jean, but “really tried” with him), and can’t escape him, even as he proudly has created an entirely new life for himself on the opposite coast.
Baumbach, who has increasingly become more experimental in his approach since joining up with Greta Gerwig on Frances Ha, also plays with editing: Many of the early scenes are peppered with severe, hilarious jumpcuts; by the end, with the story
slowing down, he favors long, black fades, reflecting the emotional temperature of the narrative.
He’s also playing with dialogue, historically, one of his primary strengths. Here, he has characters square off together, ostensibly “communicating” but in actuality conducting completely different conversations against one another, more or less talking on separate issues simultaneously, aggressively not taking in what the other is saying, in favor of their own agenda.
In order to make the family more lived in, Baumbach peppers his scenes with allusions to past traditions (such as the unexplained “famous” pancakes Harold and Danny make for each other; their abiding love for Legal Eagles, and the songs Danny wrote for the family, including a truly heartbreaking piece he wrote with his daughter), and gives his characters their own quirks — Harold repeats stories and jokes that his kids eventually latch onto for themselves; Maureen inexplicably refers to Harold as “the dad” — all of which serve to flesh out their relationships and give them the weight of shared history.
Almost needless to say,
the cast, a murderer’s row of famous Jewish actors, is uniformly outstanding (with special props given to Thompson, who is absolutely brilliant). Possibly following the pattern of an otherwise undetected comet, Sandler turns in one of those performances — see Punch Drunk Love, or Funny People — that is so good, it makes you even more resentful of the lazy, half-baked comedies he routinely churns out with his buddies. Danny is the film’s emotional touchstone, in large part because he is the only one who seems the least bit in touch with his own feelings, part of what ultimately makes him such a good father, even if the rest of his life is left wanting.
As you might imagine, the ending of the film is somewhat inconclusive — if you’re really into deep, emotional hugs with tears rolling down your cheeks, you might be better off just watching This Is Us on TV — but certainly not without hope. You get the impression Baumbach’s affection for the clan runs deep, and having spent a couple of hours in their presence, you feel similarly: It’s as if the gifted children of a J.D. Salinger novel all grew up to be crushing disappointments to themselves.