#24: Meet the Parents
Release Date: October 6th, 2000
Format: Streaming (Netflix)
Written by: John Hamburg and Jim Herzfeld
Directed by: Jay Roach
3.5 Stars
Meet the Parents is pleasant and modest, and funny. I hadn’t seen it in at least 10 years, and I forgot how well it works. Maybe in my mind I had equated it to the thirstier and hyperactive gross out comedies of that era, and it’s not that. It’s not American Pie. It’s not There’s Something About Mary.
Instead it’s this small, character-driven film that knows what it is and doesn’t try to be more. The performances are restrained and relatable, specifically Ben Stiller’s. He’s a really interesting movie star. He’s short and Jewish-looking, so I’m sure he was limited in the types of leading roles he was offered. But he’s more talented and versatile than your standard character actor from the mid-’90s, and he has that perfect Gen X persona that worked when he was in his 30s and 40s. His leading roles show him as angsty and sarcastic, but without the self-confidence of the boomer generation that came before. And in his smaller roles he’s usually the funniest guy on the screen (Dodgeball, Heavyweights, Happy Gilmore). And as a writer/director, he’s hugely underrated (Cable Guy, Zoolander, Tropic Thunder). I was really impressed with his performance in Meet the Parents. He’s likable, sensitive, and gives the movie a soul.
Now on to De Niro. It’s been fun writing about movies these past few months and seeing some De Niro performances. In hindsight, it’s bittersweet that he found out how good of a comedic actor he is with Analyze This. It really threw off his career trajectory and ultimately placed him in some truly forgettable comedies, or even worse, dramatic roles where he had to prove that he was still De Niro with a capital D. Meet the Parents ushered in the ‘00s section of his filmography, which is by far the nadir of his career (when I was working at the video store in my twenties, this was when things bottomed out for him. It was strange stocking old copies of Taxi Driver or Heat or Goodfellas and then looking over at the New Release wall and seeing Righteous Kill and Everybody’s Fine).
But De Niro was still near his peak as a performer in 2000, and he steals the show in Meet the Parents, at least comedically. He’s really, really funny. It’s just too bad that he’s so funny that it directly and indirectly caused him to star in some really shitty movies in the years that followed (see my Meet the Fockers review up next).
