Meet The Parents
No Soup for You
The scene I liked in Meet The Parents was an early scene at the dinner table. A young couple in love, played by Ben Stiller and Teri Polo, break bread with her parents, Blythe Danner and Robert DeNiro. Danner is smiling sweetly and serving undercooked pot roast, Polo is looking quietly radiant, Stiller is fidgeting nervously, and DeNiro manages to be cheerful, yet menacing.
Somehow, DeNiro has the idea that Stiller grew up on a farm. Stiller, who obviously wouldn’t know a tractor from his elbow, has to dissuade DeNiro of this belief. He didn’t grow up on a farm, he says, but it was farm country, and a lot of the other kids lived on farms, and some of them had ponies. “I hated those kids,” Stiller blathers. “In fact, I hate anyone that ever had a pony while they were growing up.”
It is at this moment that Blythe Danner’s blithe exterior cracks. “I had a pony. When I was a little girl, we all had ponies. He was a beautiful pony, and I loved him.” She begins sobbing, and runs out of the room. Polo leaves the table to comfort her mother, shooting Stiller a nasty look. DeNiro glowers at Stiller, points his finger accusingly, and says…
Well, you’ll have to use your imagination, because I made that scene up. Stole it, really, from an old Seinfeld episode. I don’t feel the least bit bad about it, either, because so much of Meet The Parents seems to be a direct rip-off of Seinfeld. Meet The Parents has airplane humor, yes, and broad physical comedy, and relationship humor, and wacky parents. (Stiller’s father, of course, was a Seinfeld regular as Jason Alexander’s father.) The plot is as thin as any sitcom episode; Stiller meets Polo’s parents, with the intention of asking her father for permission to get married, and wackiness ensues. Sort of.
Meet The Parents is a moderatly funny light comedy of errors that tries very hard to please. If that’s all you’re looking for in a movie, look no further. Anyone who’s expecting anything else should look elsewhere. Meet The Parents is only worth seeing if you’re easily entertained, or if you’re the kind of person who just loves to pick movies apart for your own cruel purposes.
The first problem with Meet The Parents is a common Hollywood problem, one that’s almost not worth talking about anymore. If you’ve seen the trailer for the movie, you’ve seen almost all of the funny parts. Meet The Parents, like Seinfeld, is designed to be “painfully funny”; if you know all the funny parts, all that’s left is painful.
The second problem is with the characterization. The focus of Meet The Parents is properly on Stiller and DeNiro, and both turn out performances that are decent if uninspired. Stiller stutters and stammers and looks uncomfortable and nervous. DeNiro is relaxed, but intimidating; he’s the rough equivalent of Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi. However, there’s no attempt to have any of these characters do anything that’s not in their respective personas. Meet The Parents doesn’t challenge either Stiller or DeNiro to do anything we haven’t already seen. Worse, all of the other characters are flat and two-dimensional; they serve more as scenery than participants. (This is most painfully obvious in the case of the gifted comic actor Owen Wilson, who literally fades into the woodwork.)
Thirdly, the script isn’t very imaginitive with its comedy. The laughs in Meet The Parents derive from one of two sources; DeNiro’s confrontations with Stiller, and Stiller’s alarming tendency to break or injure props. Stiller and DeNiro handle what’s given to them deftly, but there’s no sense of comic imagination, no unpredictability, no real surprises.
Meet The Parents manages to be just about as funny as your average Seinfeld episode. That sounds like a compliment; it isn’t. Seinfeld reruns are a third as long and you’re not charged $4.75 for the matinee. However, it is the funniest movie in months. This says much more about the state of American comic moviemaking than you really want to know.