Meet the Parents

very edge of your seat, squirm-fest. lots of laughs as you cower in embarrassment. could have utilized Owen Wilson more. i loved it... but the ending was so straight forward and devoid of any comedic relief. it becomes one big sappy cliche. why?

I know I'm late to the party, but probably so are you if you're reading reviews at this late date. "Meet the Parents" is a funny flick that hearkens back to the glorious late-80s, or maybe even earlier, when comedies weren't so preoccupied with shocking the audience with gross out gags or surprise twists. Most of this movie is wonderfully predictable, and aside from a few deliberately clumsy drug references and maybe a sexual innuendo or two, it was good clean fun from start to finish.

Most of all, I'd say it's a good date flick to prepare yourself for the inevitable agony of meeting your own boyfriend/girlfriend's parents. We all know it sucks. (If you don't think so, oh, just you wait. Sometimes it takes years for them to expose themselves as the hideous flesh eating monsters that they are.) De Niro manages to take us to the utter extreme of monster but without shattering our suspension of disbelief. This is a key point. If the situation were to become too absurd , we would lose focus on the story and instead hone in on the individual gags. While there are plenty of funny gags to go round, they are really just dressing on an already funny premise: the story of an underdog who just cannot fit in to a judgmental bourgeois family no matter how hard (and usually because of how hard) he tries.

Ben Stiller shows his acting diversity (while on a different movie set playing the terminally airheaded Zoolander) as a dorky protagonist whose best intentions are always poorly timed or received completely the wrong way.

The antagonists, in this case, everybody else in the movie, tread the fine line of comedy and irritation. That is, at any time you could find yourself laughing or hating them. What's masterfully done is the filmmaker's (and of course actors') ability to turn you on a dime, take you to the edge of wanting to kill someone but then having a hearty laugh at their antics. Like I said earlier, Robert De Niro is the anchor that makes this possible, and any casting short of him (well, or maybe Christopher Walken) would have resulted in the film falling apart due to the demands it puts on our willingness to accept a complete jerk like the character he plays. Really his only redeeming quality is that he likes cats. But that's the point, I guess. No matter how rude a person may seem, there's always something redeeming in there.

Well, maybe except for the hilariously loathsome airline attendant who appears in a short but pivotal role at the film's climax. To me, that scene was worth the price of admission.

Don't think twice, this is a movie worth seeing. Other similar films focusing on severely dysfunctional families trying to act normally include De Niro & Billy Crystal in "Analyze This", a great Andy Garcia movie called "City Island" and--this may be a stretch but--I think fans of "Meet the Parents" would really enjoy the original British "Death at a Funeral" (2007). Ya just gotta love comedies about trying to be normal in an utterly abnormal situation.

Our story begins when a male nurse named Greg Focker (Stiller) is about to propose to his girlfriend, Pam (Teri Polo); unfortunately, things come to worst and before Greg can say, "Will you marry me?" he finds out that Pam's father, Jack (Robert De Niro) approved of Pam's sister's fiancé because he asked Jack's permission to marry her first. Taken aback, Greg decides to wait until tomorrow, whence they are going to meet Pam's parents, and ask Jack for approval before proposing to Pam. Should be a piece of cake, right? Wrong. Pam's mother (Blythe Danner) is very nice, but herein lies the problem: Not only is it apparent from the start that Pam's plant-expert father is not really a plant-expert (as Greg learns after Jack doesn't seem to recognize a plant Greg gives to him--one of the rarest plants in the world), but it turns out Jack is really in the CIA and was a "human lie detector," as Pam herself puts it. In fact, Jack even gives Greg a lie detector test in one scene to see if he liked the dinner earlier in the evening. "Yes," Greg replies, to see the needle jumping. "Well, it was a little rare for my tastes, maybe." Greg, desperately seeking approval (and nervous as ever), seems to unintentionally cause mayhem in his possible parents-to-be's home. Nerves shot like a drug addict, Greg is the definition of a nervous wreck, and all his problems seem to escalate more and more until a funny-if-sappy comedic showdown.

You know how sometimes you are really nervous, but try to hide the fact? You seem to keep your cool, until you do something, then all your nervousness explodes and you start knocking over things, saying stupid things--single-handedly DOING stupid things that you just never do? And then you look around and everyone is looking at you like you are some sort of freak? Well, that's how it is with Greg's character in "Meet the Parents"--he is so easy to identify with. Just like all of us, we want to keep our cool and impress people--but once we lose it, the coolness seems to slip farther and farther away from our grip until we are klutzes on feet. For Greg's character, small things turn bigger and bigger and bigger--from knocking over the remains of Jack's mother (and having a cat go to the bathroom on the remains), to setting the house on fire and busting the septic tank. Situations seem to escalate farther and farther out of control and they just keep getting worse and worse.

In one scene, Greg tries to impress everyone while playing volleyball in a pool. His team is losing because of him. "Get up and hit the ball," Jack says to him. So the next time the ball comes around to Greg, he jumps up and smacks the ball with all his might, sending it flying towards...Pam's sister (whose wedding is the next day), shattering her nose. Greg lands back in the pool and seems to be happy, until he realizes he smacked his sister-in-law-to-be in the nose. Then everyone looks at him like he's an insensitive idiot.

Things like that have happened to me countless times, and that is why I can so easily identify with Greg. People are yelling at Greg to do something, and when he finally does it, it backfires and everyone looks at him like he's stupid, even though he did exactly what he was told.

That's the kind of thing that makes this movie so great--not only is it extremely funny, but we can easily identify with the main character countless times throughout the film. That is, perhaps, the best thing about this comedy.

Most of the funny moments in 'Meet the Parents' involve painful scenes with Ben Stiller. He plays Greg Focker, a male nurse who loves Pam Byrnes (Teri Polo). He wants to marry her with her father's permission. He hasn't met her parents yet. The movie shows us the weekend where Stiller meets the parents. Pam's father is Jack (Robert De Niro) and her mother is Dina (Blythe Danner). The more Greg tries to impress the parents, especially Jack who is a former CIA-agent, the more he humiliates himself. Not only with his actions, also with his words and stupid lies to look better.

Stiller is perfect in this kind of role. We already saw that, especially in 'There's Something About Mary'. The more he gets in trouble, the more painful it gets, the better Stiller gets and the more we laugh. There is also a fine little part from Owen Wilson as Pam's former lover. Stiller and Wilson have made a lot of films together and for some reason their scenes always work, they at least make you smile. De Niro doesn't try very hard to be a strict person who doesn't give Greg a chance and therefore succeeds even better. The way he slowly gets harder and harder on Greg is good for a new laugh every time. 'Meet the Parents', directed by Jay Roach who also directed the 'Austin Powers' trilogy, is a fine comedy with a lot of sequences where you might feel a little uncomfortable.

Odd to state that "Robert De Niro is the star of this comedy," but that's the case here. One doesn't normally associate him with comedy, but he's a pretty versatile actor, and can play a lot more characters than Mafia-type thugs. He's also a pretty darned good comedian, as he first proved way back in the early '80s with Rupert Pupkin in "The King of Comedy."

Anyway, De Niro and Ben Stiller provide a lot of laughs in this modern-day comedy. No sense going into detail as there are plenty of other reviews here. I hate to see the "hero" of a movie being a character who is chronic liar (Stiller's "Greg Focker") but that's not unusual in the world of films. That, and Blythe Danner's excessive use of God's name as exclamations gets annoying.

Other than that, it's a fun movie that turned out to be a hit and justifiably so. I imagine you could get a lot of laughs from watching this over and over. That would be better than watching the sequel.