The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), film review: Like father, like fun

Adam Sandler and Ben Stiller’s Netflix comedy-drama about intergenerational angst is a surprise delight
Still got it: Noah Baumbach's latest is a feat of ensemble acting
Atsushi Nishijima/NETFLIX
Matthew Norman14 November 2017

With the carols shortly to echo through shopping centres and the nerve-shredding countdown to the John Lewis’s TV advert under way, thoughts turn to the most sacred observance of the year. I refer, obviously, to Festivus, “the festival for the rest of us” inaugurated 20 years ago in Seinfeld by Frank Costanza, father of George.

Festivus, which falls on December 23, has so much to commend it to the secular curmudgeons who loathe the commercialism and saccharine jollity of Christmas. But what elevates it to the apex of the midwinter festival pantheon is The Airing of the Grievances, the centrepiece ritual in which family members gather to explain — in precise, truculent detail — how they have pissed each other off in the preceding 12 months.

The spirit of Festivus comes early this year in the form of the The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), a sweet-and-sour banquet of family grievance aired today on its own platform and in selected cinemas by the good folk at Netflix.

Astoundingly, the movie’s most irksome facet is its title. When a cast list includes not only Ben Stiller (son of Jerry Stiller, who played Frank Costanza, and thus Festivus royalty himself) but also Adam Sandler, you don’t expect the pretentious use of brackets to be the main source of vexation.

Since they last worked together, on Happy Gilmore in 1996, these two have established themselves in almost every Top 20 Most Annoying Actors list available online. To find one name in the credits may be counted a misfortune. To find both is the filmic equivalent, pardoning my vulgarity, of visiting the GP with a nasty rash and being told you have herpes and gonorrhoea.

But knock me down with a feather… in writer-director Noah Baumbach’s wry examination of intergenerational angst and broken dreams, they are truly excellent as two geographically and emotionally distant half-brothers driven to virtual non-speakers by father Harold’s (Dustin Hoffman) blatant favouritism of his younger son.

Sandler plays the elder boy, Danny. A drifting failure in his career, he is a great father to Eliza, whose departure for college (she minors in parodic porn movies) breaks his heart. These two have the idyllic relationship, joshing sweetly at the piano while singing the cute songs he made up for her when she was tiny, which throws his troubled one with Harold into sharp relief. For Stiller’s Matthew, long since fled to LA, that formula is flipped. He is a career success in wealth-management but seems an abstracted father to a young son.

From the moment it begins, with a black-and-white chapter heading, Woody Allen’s influence is clear. The film wears its Jewishness lightly, and for whatever reasons, Allen has tended to give the horrors of parent-child dysfunction a wide artistic berth. But the faintly elegiac shots of New York, sharpness of dialogue, tinkly jazz piano score (by Randy Newman) and pastiching of art-gallery pseudery make no bones as to whom homage is being paid.

Hoffman’s Harold, a retired art professor and sculptor whose colossal talent is recognised solely by himself, has done to his sons what Philip Larkin knew he would, but in different ways. Driven and self-obsessed, he neglected Danny and his daughter Jean (Elizabeth Marvel), the other product of his first marriage. Overcompensating from guilt, he later smothered Matthew half to death.

Emma Thompson is hilarious as Harold’s sozzled third wife — this is ensemble acting of the highest order

The movie episodically narrates the various paths towards reconciliation the three take before, and more urgently after, a blood clot on the brain threatens Harold’s life. In contrast to its overlong title, the movie compresses its emotional core into the brief answer a hospital employee gives when one of them asks how best to bid their comatose dad farewell: “I love you. Forgive me. I forgive you. Thank you. Goodbye.”

On first hearing, as intended, that sounds like a pastiche of grief-counselling triteness. But by the time Stiller repeats it, in a beautifully delivered soliloquy about fatherhood, the rapprochements have imbued it with a simple, moving profundity. What else, when you think about it, need be said?

Hoffman is predictably great as an embittered narcissist who illustrates the truth of Gore Vidal’s “Every time a friend succeeds, something inside me dies” by storming out of a mate’s art exhibition in fury at his own lack of recognition. He thinks he is a genius, and one of the boys feels compelled to agree, only because “otherwise he’s just a prick”. The other speculates that sometimes there’s a reason for being undiscovered.

With Emma Thompson hilarious as Maureen, Harold’s boho and sozzled third wife, and Grace Van Patten enchanting as Eliza, this is ensemble acting of the highest order.

There are irritations beside the title. The cutting away from scenes mid-sentence is a comedic flourish best suited for the editing suite bin. As the film develops, the laughs thin out, and the suspicion grows that this is a film version of a play yet to be staged.

But these are minor moans about a clever, thoughtful, elegantly wistful examination of the organic family’s resilience. Despite their meanderings and lunacies, for all the estrangements and resentments, however wounded and limping, it has a miraculous ability to survive.

So it is here. Once the Meyerowitz grievances have been aired, a sprinkling of love, forgiveness and gratitude dusts the decades of resentment with the icing of cartharsis. And with that, far too early but better that than never, a miserable Festivus to you all.

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