Meet The Parents
dir. Jay Roach, 2000

(review by Jon Horne 2001)

© Touch Nottingham (internet magazine and What's On guide)

The title says most of what you want to know about this film: that it is a lightweight romantic comedy; something to take your girlfriend to see, to while away a winter evening if you've already taken When Harry Met Sally back to the video shop.

You know what's going to happen: The gawky but charming hero is going to meet his prospective in-laws; they're going to hate him, everything will go wrong, hilariously or not, and then it will all turn out right in the end. This is precisely what happens (with the additional complication that the girlfriend's father used to be in the CIA), and it's very funny in places. The jokes are telegraphed long in advance (when a packet of cigarettes lands on the roof of the house, you know that there is going to be a cigarette-on-the-roof gag later on), but instead of being irritating, this just brings a delicious, old-fashioned feeling of anticipation. Indeed, many of the routines would sit comfortably in a Laurel and Hardy film, and this is no bad thing. Ben Stiller has a visage that was made for expressions of frustration, and the slapstick jokes give him plenty of scope for pulling Oliver Hardy-ish "here we go again" faces.

Teri Pollo, as Stiller's girlfriend, is miscast, and her role is badly underwritten. In a romantic comedy, the girl is supposed to be funny and charming too, and Pollo just isn't. Prettiness, blonde hair and sexual voracity - though excellent qualities for a person to have - are not good enough reasons for Stiller's character to go through all this in order to win her hand in marriage. The main criticism I have of the film is that there is no real spark between the characters. Had (for example) Joan Cusack played the girlfriend, it would have been a very different film. Presumably they couldn't afford her after they'd paid Robert De Niro.

De Niro is good though. His unhinged gangster persona lends itself superbly to comedy, and we get to see endless variations of his old "you're dead" smile, as his character shifts uneasily between the roles of over-protective father and CIA agent. Some fairly unpromising material (such as running jokes about Stiller's character's name - Greg Focker) becomes painfully funny in De Niro's vicious hands. A surprise star turn comes from Owen Wilson, as Pollo's ex-boyfriend. Handsome and perfect in a Nordic-god sort of way, his presence gives the film its nastiest edge - that the jokes are really about Stiller's character being Jewish - that being the real reason Pollo's family hates him. The script tries to bleed the tension out of this by having Pollo and De Niro mention the fact, but it's always there, and the comedy benefits from the genuine unease that it causes on the part of the audience.

All in all, not a great film, but funny, and worth seeing if you've got a spare couple of hours. Of course, if you've seen anything else recently, you'll have seen the trailer, which contains all of the plot and most of the jokes, so it helps if you are prone to lapses in short-term memory, which I'm sure some of you are.

Oh, and see it at the Odeon if you can. It's not long before the place shuts for good, so let's all try and remember what it feels like to sit in a proper cinema.

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