Family-Film Feud
MEET THE FOCKERS
KEYS TO THE HOUSE
DIRECTED BY GIANNI AMELIO
IN MEET THE FOCKERS, old-timers Dustin Hoffman's and Barbra Streisand's milestones (they were the first proudly Jewish movie star and the leading exemplars of the 60s "Be Yourself" ethic) provide the perfect background for Ben Stiller, the perennial ethnic schmuck who is always climbing and always abashed.
Stiller represents a politically fumbling generation-media-smart, sarcastic, yet unappreciative of its historical and ethnic foundations. His 2000 hit Meet the Parents turned that dilemma into broad situation comedy as Stiller's Greg Focker wooed Pam (Teri Polo), the WASP daughter of stern, former CIA officer Jack Byrnes (Robert De Niro). Greg's attempt at assimilation (bleached of its ethnic component) was another fish-out-of-water story. Streisand and Hoffman, playing Stiller's parents in Meet the Fockers, enrich the silly concept. This movie ignores Pam's reactions to her in-laws for Greg's apprehension over the older generation's clash. We, in turn, await the issues of self-acceptance and political difference that Greg (called "a young Jewish Marlon Brando" by his doting parents) fearfully suppresses.
Jack Byrne and his placid wife Dina (Blythe Danner) represent Midwestern Republican conservatism, while Bernie and Roz Focker symbolize Miami-based Democractic liberalism (he's a retired lawyer and she's a sex therapist). When these cultural stereotypes come together at the Fockers' Miami residence, Focker Isle, they exaggerate the contemporary discord of the 2004 presidential election. Fockers' caricatures (they're not exactly characters) satirize the infernal American mix.
This comic truth is more emotionally generous than director Jay Roach's original design with Meet the Parents. That was a dumbed-down version of Stiller's identity-crisis road-movie Flirting with Disaster, bluntly pitting Stiller's naive ethnic outsider against De Niro's right-wing autocrat; mild critique of racism was both a sham and imbecilic. What that film lacked in political sense, this sequel provides in bonhomie.
Hoffman and Streisand reconnect with their showbiz roots by going to the roots of ethnic humor. They play outspoken, appetitive, appealingly vulgar Jews. Bernie's Hawaiian-shirted gregariousness gives way to a little fit of barely controlled rage that may be the most charming acting Hoffman's ever done. Streisand does Roz's sexual honesty ("Let's get your kundalini rising!") without eye makeup; her always-empathetic face more open and relaxed than ever. It's been easy to forget De Niro's comic background in Brian De Palma's early counterculture comedies. His recent presence in lesser Billy Crystal comedies confirms that the notion of the counterculture has been erased. That's why his interplay with Hoffman and Streisand is so heartening. Beyond espousing any political position-although that's implicit-their roles in Fockers restore sympathy to wacky comedy. They improve the Stiller genre's travesty of human nature.
Meet the Fockers doesn't have James L. Brooks' sophistication about class and ethnicity, but look at how some of its ideas complement Spanglish. The Jewish/WASP, liberal/conservative clash is a cartoon version of Brooks' behavioral and social observations. Fockers polishes the usual showbiz-ethnic polarities while Spanglish gets deep into temperamental and ethnic mismatch: John Clasky's (Adam Sandler) marriage to Deborah (Tea Leoni) recalls Greg and Pam's hopeful, liberal-American engagement, but Brooks more daringly shows their relationship at its tipping point. Their incompatibility is a tragic effect of cross-cultural desire. Each Clasky tried to get beyond their backgrounds (following the film's immigrant-daydream thesis), but their personalities got in the way of the freethinking Ideal.
Brooks looks at the anxiety that class advancement entails. John, a celebrated chef, is afraid of success and wary of acceptance. Deborah, equally insecure, competes with him and her mother Evelyn (Cloris Leachman), a former lounge singer now alcoholic. The intervention of the Mexican maid Flor (Paz Vega) catalyzes the Clasky family's dysfunction. She reveals greater democratic irony than Fockers' vaudeville routine about the sexy Cuban maid.
Sandler gets his most humane characterization in Spanglish. (It makes up for the cipher-comedy of Punch-Drunk Love and the confused but affectionate Hanukkah parody Eight Crazy Nights.) Not demonstrably Jewish, John seems ethnically detached. A gentle father, he's almost pathologically quiet in a household that Deborah makes chaotic. But this isn't the usual Sandler schlub. Softness is John's character; he suggests a sensitive man overwhelmed by circumstance, who has collapsed into himself. At a moment of crisis, he exclaims, "Was that a crack in the planet or was it just a noise in my head?" This skeptical intuition brings out the drama in Spanglish's comedy.
At the other, ethnically based extreme, Tea Leoni's Deborah partakes of Diane Keaton's neurotically dithering beauties. It's a performance of comparable gravity. ("You're the most amazing white woman I have ever met," Flor says in exasperated admiration.) Deborah keeps herself going by pursuit of career goals she adopted in exchange for immediate affection, acting out the emotional component missing from Teri Polo's and Blythe Danner's Focker portrayals. She's a young, pretty Vera Drake; when her illusions crumble, she achieves that fearless, raw affect of Mike Leigh's social victims.
American humorists don't concentrate on victimhood. Instead, Spanglish is a comedy where, to quote Flor's daughter, "like a novela, so many traumas converge." It isn't a perfect mix, but it addresses the complexities of American assimilation that Fockers would have us laugh past.
Fockers doesn't attain the ethnic self-scrutiny it might-the kind that makes Philip Roth such a bold satirist. (Does Ben Stiller read?) Had Hoffman and Streisand played Jewish Beverly Hills parvenus, Fockers might have further dovetailed with Spanglish-or been as deep as an old Paul Mazursky comedy. It might have explained how red-state/blue-state divisions arose from the death of the counterculture and the rise of Stiller and Sandler's superficially committed, nouveau-liberal generation. Instead, the film's "Focker" gags (such as the WASP bride-to-be declaring her name "Pamela Martha Focker") merely deflect from politics.
When Greg discovers his parents romping, Bernie says, "We're just being ourselves," and Roz intuits, "I think he wants us to stop being ourselves." Caught in mid-shtick, Hoffman and Streisand (they don't believe in victimhood, either) pinpoint the insecurity in Stiller's comedy. It's a neurosis they are comfortably well past. But significantly, Stiller is not. The wrap-up in which the two fractious families converge doesn't consult authority like the classic farce resolutions of You Can't Take It with You or What's Up, Doc?; rather, it lacks authority.
Meet the Fockers entrusts ethnic and political issues to Greg's conflicted sensibility. Here's where De Niro, Hoffman and Streisand eventually follow commercial dictates, merely giving lip service to such counterculture principles as "Make noise! That's what this country's all about. Question authority!" Fact is, Greg's solipsistic self-defense indicates that a very unradical political perspective rules the day. It's not the same as his elders standing up for principle decades ago. Nor is it comparable to James Brooks scrutinizing how capitalist-democratic ideals conflict with personal realities. Stiller is uncommitted enough to simply be nostalgic about roots, religion, politics. Fockers' humor cannot substitute for the insight of Spanglish.
Family dramas don't come more specific-or more moving-than Gianni Amelio's The House Keys. Virtually a two-character observation of a young, neglectful father (Kim Rossi Stuart) coming to love the child he abandoned (Andrea Rossi), it turns ordinariness into revelation. Scanning the two-way street of forgiveness, Amelio shows what one generation learns from the other. This probably great movie slips in under the blockbuster radar-there's not a better film in town-but it looms in memory.
DONKEY SKIN
DIRECTED BY JACQUES DEMY
SHREK'S POPULARITY SIGNIFIES the need for fairy tales (and the contemporary pressure to disdain them), but Jacques Demy dared to essay a fairy tale straight-on with his 1970 adaptation of Charles Perrault's Donkey Skin. His model was Jean Cocteau's 1945 live-action Beauty and the Beast, so he cast the Beast, Jean Marais, as the widower King who decides he must marry his daughter (Catherine Deneuve) to provide the kingdom with a successor. Sexist bias takes second place to the shock of incest, but Demy understood fairy tales are not timid about scandal. Demy forthrightly explores several variations on love: a girl child's infatuation with daddy that must be outgrown and an old ruler's need for selfless compassion.
Demy embraces fairy-tale form and eccentricity to express his own, almost enchanted, wisdom. It is articulated twice: "Life always mixes the greatest good with evil" and "Fairies are our inner force." Demy's fairy-tale images are not meant to make sense; he shares Cocteau's interest in penetrating the subconscious. He respects the tales we're told as children for influencing our later lives. That's what a character refers to as "the poetry of the future."