Remakes (usually) count towards a franchise’s entry count, so Meet the Parents (the franchise) squeaks under our consideration – just barely. (What joy.)
This is because the original Meet the Parents was an independently filmed 1992 comedy, written by, directed by, and starring Greg Glienna. What’s that? You’ve never heard of this? Well there’s a good reason for that. For while Glienna’s Meet the Parents was received quite positively by critics, it was also targeted by for immediate remaking – just as Hollywood does with all good movies not of Californian origin. Like so many a foreign masterpiece due up for a purposeless English version, studios fought successfully to ensure Meet the Parents would never be seen again, or even be given a minor theatrical release (beyond what it already saw).
This is why we start with the big budget, 2000 Meet the Parents. And why a remake? There must’ve been some really groundbreaking concept underlying Glienna’s movie…
An unlucky guy meets his girlfriend’s parents, shenanigans ensue.
Why, that’s a universal concern, something nearly everyone knows! It makes sense for this to be a comedy, but it seems odd you’d need to secure rights to an unknown indy movie to do so. Unless Hollywood types are so far removed from common human existence, they don’t know about things like “meeting parents” or “family get-togethers” or any of that. Yeah, that sounds likely!
Still, a $100,000 movie becomes a $50 million movie, even while the remake features barely anything beyond a few well-toned houses, and no action sequences. That’s 500 times the budget, for no good reason! Of course, the Hollywood moviemaking machine is a lugubrious process, inherently money-hungry when done at the fullest studio level, subject matter be damned.
Still, why bury Glienna’s greatest effort ever, in order to make a film about such a standard notion? Well, it happens there were good jokes in Glienna’s Meet the Parents, and that’s something you can’t get by simply throwing money around. So Hollywood threw money around, bought Glienna’s gags and framework (to avoid the plagiarism this otherwise implies), then set about a ridiculously lengthy 8-year process doing their version. How does this take so long?!
Well, it seems everyone wanted a hand at fouling up Glienna’s jokes with millions of dollars. Steven Soderbergh was considered, but he bowed out to do Out of Sight instead – good call. Then none other than Stephen Spielberg considered the project, and we know how he handles comedy. Given Spielberg’s obsession with smaltzy family worship, it’s likely he intended to transform Glienna’s misanthropic anti-marriage black comedy into a sugary screed on American values and s- Excuse me, I think I just vomited a little. Audiences dodged a bullet on that one, for Spielberg’s flick would’ve included Jim Carrey, a comic grotesque whose style surely doesn’t mesh with anything like “slice of life.”
There are so many wrongheaded and jaded notions in its production, it’s a wonder 2000’s Meet the Parents is halfway decent. Now helmed by comedic up-and-comer Jay Roach (trying his hand at something more character-driven than his Austin Powers movies), Meet the Parents earns most of its value from a good cast. Ben Stiller plays the put-upon boyfriend, in the best version of his “comic everyman” character (as opposed to his favored “insane nutcase” character – see Zoolander and Tropic Thunder). As Stiller’s costar, the girlfriend’s father gets all the meat, as essayed by Robert De Niro. Not a noted comic performer (despite being The King of Comedy), the late ‘90s saw De Niro essentially cease to care – at least about Scorcesian-style drama. Following Analyze This’ comic “breakthrough,” De Niro used i to trade on his tough guy reputation to humorous end. It’s the sort of pairing movies Hollywood always tries to come up with, and regularly fail at.
The rest of the cast recedes compared to these two, especially the women. As “the girlfriend” (that is, plot motivator), they’d originally considered Naomi Watts, until she was deemed “not sexy enough.” Yeah, right! The logical processes of Hollywood, sometimes they completely stymie me. Instead, this thankless role goes to Teri Polo – who hasn’t otherwise particularly earned a name for herself.
If Meet the Parents 1992 was about the weekend-from-hell, the shiny, futuristic, Twenty-First Century Meet the Parents upgrades that to the wedding-from-hell. Not only is Greg the Jewish Schlemiel going to meet Pam Byrnes’ disapproving parents, Jack and Dina. No, now it’s a part of her sister’s wedding – Deborah (Nicole DeHugg) and Dr. Bob (Thomas McCarthy). And also Pam’s ex-fiancée, played by Owen Wilson, because you can’t have a Ben Stiller comedy without Owen Wilson. This raises the stakes (the wedding, not Owen Wilson). Greg can inadvertently destroy a whole ceremony (or at least its preliminary events), as a cavalcade of escalating lies and little problems (hidden cigarettes, relationship status) mounts to punish Greg.
Jack, the fatherly taskmaster, is himself a ridiculous caricature of family values. Resolutely Protestant and old-fashioned, Jack subtly rules his brood with an iron hand. Greg is the sole figure to lash out against it, but one gets the sense that all are somewhat terrorized by the man. In all, Jack is an amalgamation of the worst traits one could imagine in a girlfriend’s father – and as Robert De Niro, he holds all the authority. (Jack gets maybe a slight arc, but he exists mostly as an obstacle for Greg.) And not only is Jack played by a famous tough guy, but he’s an ex-CIA interrogator – an exaggeration, sure, but one that informs the scenario.
Meet the Parents’ humor comes from certain areas. It is not gag-driven, but in intent something closer to the French farce – an intricate machine of misunderstanding and compounded foolishness, where the plot is the joke. This is an exceedingly difficult form to do, so unsurprisingly Meet the Parents does not quite meet that standard. Still, there is a general structure of setting up future payoffs, even with unrelated scenes in between, which makes the eventual jokes seem more intelligent than they really are.
Consider the obvious setup of a vase containing grandmother’s ashes. It takes absolutely zero predictive capabilities to anticipate this urn’s destruction. And yet it’s only at the end of a very leisurely scene that said destruction happens – as Greg opens a champagne bottle. This bottle itself got an earlier scene devoted to its purchase, so that’s set up. And Jack’s precious cat Mr. Jinx has already been shown to be a reconstructed litter defecator. So it’s entirely in-context when Jinx pisses all over grandma’s remains. In the end, this endless scene is dedicated to a cat’s bowel movements (which in the context of most 2000 comedy actually seems tasteful), making the intelligence of the comedy somewhat suspect.
That’s not even getting into all the effort Meet the Parents takes to establish the Byrnes’ suspect downstairs toilet. Scene upon scene is dedicated to this appliance, many of those moments laboring to set up a visual gag wherein Jinx now craps here. (This movie is singularly obsessed with the cat’s butthole.) All this effort for a scene where the Byrnes’ lawn is covered in shit. And then everybody gets covered in the shit. At a wedding rehearsal – and it’s only the surrounding details, the wedding and the setup, which elevate this shit joke even slightly.
The other side of Meet the Parents’ humor is more sophisticated, since it doesn’t merely expend ridiculous effort upon scatology. Rather, Meet the Parents nicely predicts the ‘00s’ trend of discomfort humor (distinct from gross-out humor). Think “The Office” (UK), or “The Office” (US), or probably something else I cannot think of.
The gist is this: Greg is a pariah in Jack’s tight knit family, a Jew amongst WASPs (Wikipedia makes a huge deal out of this point, as apparently “Jewishness in a Hollywood movie” is a big deal), middleclass amongst upper-class, nurse amongst doctors (Greg is a male nurse, allowing the film’s opening joke concern catheters – ha ha ha!). These people essentially hate him, or at best disregard him, often in the most subtle and condescending ways. This is Parents’ character comedy, a parade of humiliations for Greg – and it hits way too close to home!
Making Greg feel genuinely, relatably miserable is this film’s raison d’être. There’s so much stilted awkwardness in his interactions with Pam’s family. It is very easy to find the cruelty in all this very not funny, but it’s a matter of taste. Skill is needed to effectively convey such a realistic situation, and still make comedy the obvious intent. To Meet the Parents’ infinite benefit, this comic mode permeates the entire running time, and isn’t dependent upon distinct gags or laugh moments to be effective. Thus squirmy, uncomfortable laughter of recognition propels Meet the Parents past its chunky feces moments, or its stilted setups – and all this comes from the leads’ performances, especially Stiller’s. They simultaneously sell the film’s believability and comic fantasy at once.
This mode finds its highpoint in the film’s centerpiece (if the posters are to believed), a scene where Jack hooks Greg up to a polygraph machine – you know, a lie detector. It’s the “girlfriend’s father” situation boiled down to its essence, yet made ridiculous. It’s all squirming, and nervousness, and – and – and it’s over way too fast! For once, a scene ends early, and goes nowhere, at just the moment ripest for milking (as opposed to cat milking, something else Meet the Parents addresses, because it is obsessed with that damn cat’s glands). The writing lets the actors down, but the actors do OK – and this scene is Stiller and De Niro alone, nothing else!
But then there’s Greg’s name. His last name is Focker. It’s funny, see, because it’s one letter different from “Fucker!” Ooh, filthy! Like cat excrement, or some such! Apparently, such a notion comes of the Jim Carrey days, and boy does Meet the Parents lean on “Focker” at every damn moment it can! It is funny at first (“Are you a pothead, Focker?”), but it loses so very much of its power with repetition, for it seems at time the filmmakers trusted nothing else but the name to be humorous. (To say nothing of the sequels.) And the punch line? Greg’s real first name: Gaylord. Poor fucking guy.
Of course, this comedy of humiliation works best in the familial setting, where Greg is the outsider. Eventually the movie deigns to broaden Greg’s carnival of misery, once he’s already earned ostracization from his potential in-laws. Here the airline industry is lampooned, at length, during the climactic moments when we expect they ought to be most fully be concerned with the Greg vs. Jack show. (They can’t continue with that vein, sadly, for this Meet the Parents – unlike Glienna’s – seeks a happy ending, and reacceptance for Greg. For the heartwarming.) So Greg’s unending tirades at airplane staff (and their nearly pathological mistreatment of him) seem unrelated to the film’s central premises. Now the universe is out to discomfort him. Oddly still, as a film from 2000, it didn’t take long for this portrayal of air travel to lose all pertinence. They show it as over-zealous and paranoid now, but in less than a year…
There isn’t much point to examining Meet the Parents the way I’d like, as it relates to Glienna’s original. That just leaves it (for now) as a one-off comedy, of an exceedingly basic premise, performed well enough and written…more iffily. In the context of 2000, where American Pie’s titular pie-fucking ruled as the zenith of American comedy, Meet the Parents must’ve seemed a most subtle creation – shit-lawn and cat nipples and all. And amazingly for such a careful construction, Meet the Parents proved surprisingly popular – largely due to audiences responding to the inherent promise in the Stiller/De Niro team-up. A $330 million gross is nothing to sneeze at, especially for a comedy – a genre not known to play as well theatrically, or globally.
For all its unpleasant pariah humor, Meet the Parents is a resolutely conservative picture, with a feel-good ending and a favorable view towards the institutions it purports to mock. No doubt much mainstream love for the flick comes of that fact, as it’s ultimately reassuring even when playing the rebel. And let’s see…Wedding Crashers, The Hangover, it seems you must have a wedding to have a successful comedy most of the time. It appeals to the widest spectrum of audiences, even while I hear no one today debating the merits of Meet the Parents (and that’s even with a sequel in theaters!). It doesn’t stick with you for long, the way everyone I know can quote financial duds like The Big Lebowski endlessly, but in theaters this mediocre approach works wonders (financial wonders).
Related posts:
• No. 3 Meet the Fockers (2004)
• No. 4 Little Fockers (2010)
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