Star role Hoffman wanted to turn down
DIRECTOR Noah Baumbach watched as Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson wept while an audience at the Grand Theatre Lumiere cheered them — and fellow stars Adam Sandler and Ben Stiller — following a screening of The Meyerowitz Stories at the Cannes Film Festival.
Baumbach called his latest movie ‘very personal’, although he insisted it was not autobiographical.
Hoffman plays Harold Meyerowitz, an artist who feels he hasn’t been given his due; while others have received (unfairly, in his view) more of the limelight.
Harold is named after Baumbach’s grandfather Harold, and the old master Hoffman finds a poignant wit at the centre of his core.
Harold’s fourth wife is played by a delightful, but almost unrecognisable, Emma Thompson. She is stepmother to Harold’s children, played by Sandler, Stiller and Elizabeth Marvel. And there is a star-making breakout performance by Grace Van Patten, as Sandler’s student film-maker daughter.
‘My grandfather Harold was a painter, though in the film Dustin’s a sculptor,’ Baumbach told me.
His grandfather painted him, but he remembers being disappointed with the result. ‘He was more abstract than I was hoping for,’ he said. ‘I wanted something that looked like me.’
Hoffman initially turned down the role, but his son Jake persuaded him to change his mind. ‘The thing about Hoffman is that he turned down every major director in the last 50 years — including Ingmar Bergman! — so it would have put me in incredible company had he said no,’ Baumbach joked.
As Hoffman and his son observed, the director uses ‘comedy as a weapon’ in his films and The Meyerowitz Stories is no exception.
Baumbach called it a study of an artist who wants more success ‘but he is embarrassed to admit it’.
The director, who got backing for the film from producer Scott Rudin and Netflix, has given us a rueful masterpiece, powered by his astute observations of our foibles — and by some topflight, but grounded, performances.
The Meyerowitz Stories will have a limited run in cinemas and be streamed on Netflix later in the year.