Noah Baumbach's 'The Meyerowitz Stories' Is A Familiar Daddy-Issue Family Dramedy [Cannes Review]

The not-exactly-thinly-populated category of the daddy-issue family dramedy gets an occasionally sparky but mostly desultory workout in Noah Baumbach‘s “The Meyerowitz Stories (New And Collected).” Cumbersome as the title is, it’s both a hint as to the loose, episodic, chapter-based storytelling, and a lie. The stories might be collected, but they’re not particularly imaginatively curated, and to anyone with a basic working knowledge of Baumbach’s back catalogue, the indie-movie scene of the last two decades, and/or mid-period Woody Allen, they’re certainly not new. The densely talky film feels like a condensed version of a TV show, and it won’t lose much, cinematographically speaking, in its translation to the small screen on Netflix, especially when so much of its staging is unremarkable: two-hander, often overlapping dialogue scenes that run their course from beginning to end in a single location. In fact, the amiable and undemanding ‘Meyerowitz’ evokes so many other media — television, short story, theater — that it’s a little unclear as to quite why it’s a film.

It begins with a pop, though, with Danny (Adam Sandler) and his doted-on, college-bound daughter Eliza (Grace Van Patten) engaging in the borderline contact sport that is trying to find a parking space in upper Manhattan. “How did I miss that? I’m a good parker!” he bleats as he’s bested once again by the smallness of a space or the blaring car horns behind. They’re on their way to visit Harold (Dustin Hoffman), Danny’s father, a sculptor who is not quite as famous as he thinks he should be, who lives with his fourth wife Maureen (Emma Thompson), a vaguely new-agey dipso who Harold insists has quit drinking, despite all evidence to the contrary. Jean (Elizabeth Marvel) is also present, though unregarded until she speaks, and over an inedible dinner of Maureen’s daffy devising (lumps of sharkflesh and unopened shellfish), the talk frequently turns to Matthew (Ben Stiller), the favored youngest son (and Danny and Jean’s half-brother), who lives out in LA and is the most financially successful one of the kids.

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Matthew comes for a visit to New York that ends on a recriminatory note (it’s not the last time an encounter will include someone accusing someone else of “making me feel bad about myself”), but shortly afterwards, Harold is taken ill and Matthew returns, and the three grown siblings engage in some soul-searching with respect to their relationships with their mercurial, self-absorbed father. As is often the case, the less-loved, directionless Danny is the more dutiful son and the more convinced of their father’s underappreciated genius, though Matthew’s more privileged status in his father’s affections comes with its own drawbacks. The Meyerowitzes are the Wes Anderson‘s Tenenbaums without the designer drollery, or the Berkmans of Baumbach’s own “The Squid And The Whale” just a few years on, and without quite the same concentration of caustic soda in their volatile family chemistry.

Really, it’s a film about cultured white New Yorkers and their fraught father/son relationships as the sons reach the maturity and perspective of middle age: young enough to hang onto some of the resentments of childhood, but old enough to be a little disappointed with the way they’ve lived their lives as independent adults. And to its detriment, the film really is largely about the sons. Elizabeth Marvel’s Jean works some colorless job at Xerox (in case her lank hair and mousy duds didn’t signal enough) and does finally get her own chapter heading, but after “Danny” and “Matthew,” hers is “(Jean’s Story),” and that’s highly appropriate. Despite Marvel’s adeptness in the role, Jean is a literally parenthesized character. “You have no idea how it feels to be me in this family!” she exclaims to her brothers at one point, as if having the film acknowledge the raw deal that Jean got in life will distract us from the nearly identical raw deal she’s getting in the film.

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But then, it’s not just Jean: most of the Meyerowitz women are underwritten, or scarcely even mentioned, like Jean and Danny’s mother, or the women who bore Danny and Matthew’s children. The focus remains resolutely on the two grown sons’ relationships with each other and with their father, and almost everything else is background noise.

Despite these criticisms, this is an amiable affair, and the family chemistry is summoned well between the three male leads. Inasmuch as the film has a revelation, it is Sandler, though we’ve always known he can act, which is why it is so irritating that he so often chooses not to. Good though he is at Danny’s hangdog-ish underachiever vibe, that also has a few spontaneous outbursts of punch-drunk temper, it’s a performance that feels destined to be overpraised merely because it’s not reliant on the hilarity of being able to sneeze, burp and fart simultaneously prior to having sex with Salma Hayek.

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More fundamental to the film is the nature of the dialogue, as this kind of erudite, cultured but also petty, neurotic and narcissistic conversation has such a clear model in the writing of Woody Allen. But Allen at his best can write sentences that are stuffed with self-examination, cultural reference points, and classic joke-making, but that still rat-tat-tat with the rhythm of believable real life. Baumbach’s script never quite sings like that. It has its moments, like Maureen realizing she’s hanging onto a wok she will probably never use again because “you have an idea of yourself, you know?” or Danny’s sudden understanding that he needs to believe in Harold’s genius, because otherwise his father was “just a prick.” But more often, the dialogue feels orchestrated and a little stilted, crammed with backstory and breathless anecdote in a way that doesn’t sounds naturalistic, but that doesn’t have enough of a slant to be stylized either.

Lacking the bite of “The Squid And The Whale” or the airy offbeat naturalism of “Frances Ha,” the film feels some way off Baumbach’s best work, and more like a chance to give some fine actors (and DP Robbie Ryan, on unusually anonymous form) an untaxing run around the paddock. And while there’s nothing wrong with that, and the blood-temperature familiarity feels comfy, there is still the nagging sense that we’re just passing the time here in a world that doesn’t resemble real life as much as it resembles other movies we’ve been fond of before. It is through endless repetition and recitation that stories become fairytales, after all, and the way that ‘Meyerowitz’ slots into such well-worn grooves suggests that future folklorists may someday record a new one that begins “Once upon a time there was a dysfunctional New York Jewish family with an overbearing father…” [B-]

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