Meet the Fockers Review
by Harvey S. Karten (harveycritic AT cs DOT com)December 22nd, 2004
MEET THE FOCKERS
Reviewed by Harvey S. Karten
Universal Pictures
Grade: B-
Directed by: Jay Roach
Written by: Jim Herzfeld, John Hamburg, story by Jim Herzfeld, and Mark Hyman
Cast: Robert De Niro, Ben Stiller, Dustin Hoffman, Blythe Danner, Teri Polo, Barbra Streisand
Screened at: Universal, NYC, 12/21/04
Forget about laws in the U.S. against bigamy. When a man gets married, he marries not only his fiancee, but his own parents and the mother and father of his bride. Why must a groom and bride get their parents together to meet and presumably to become friends for life? Who knows? But it's tradition!
In May Roach's comedy, written by Jim Herzfeld and John Hamburg from a story by Mr. Herzfeld and Mark Hyman, a Jewish-American nurse, Greg Focker (Ben Stiller) is engaged to be married in six months to a white-bread beauty, Pam Byrnes (Teri Polo). Much of the humor comes from the age-old chaos that erupts when people from different cultural backgrounds get together–not so much because the happy couple are themselves miles apart, but because their parents are stuck in their respective cultural conditioning. In that regard, we're in the territory mined by Joel Zwick in his overpraised "My Big Fat Greek Wedding"–about a Greek-American woman trying to
break free of her family's stifling adherence to old-world customs and getting them to accept her falling in love with a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Greg and Pam's situation is complicated by yet another factor. Her WASPish dad, Jack (Robert De Niro) is an uptight, ex-CIA agent who, like any other good parent, wants the best for his children. To get the info he needs, he uses tactics he learned in espionage school to dig up some dirt on his future son-in-law and, if necessary to get his daughter to cancel the wedding. Greg's dad, Bernie (Dustin Hoffman), on the other hand, is a retired lawyer who is emotionally laid-back and carries on his meeting with Pam's parents in a casual manner, giving hugs when Jack expects
handshakes.
"Meet the Fockers" is the obligatory sequel to director Roach's "Meet the Parents," about a nurse who spends a weekend with his girlfriend's parents. He hopes to ask her uptight father for her hand in marriage, but is intimidated so much that he bungles things continually. That film is the more amusing one, perhaps because of its novelty. "Fockers," which reverses the setup by having Pam's family meet Greg's, is as uneven as its predecessor, a series of Saturday Night Live-style sketches, some of which bomb, others are cute, and a few are downright belly-laughs.
Jay Roach marks time for quite a while, as the real gags begin only when the six principals get together at the spacious Florida home of the retired lawyer and his wife, Roz (Barbra Streisand), who is employed as a sex therapist. Roz Focker's career lends itself to much of the movie's sexual innuendo. We see Roz teaching a group of senior citizens some sexual positions that could have come out of the Kama Sutra but which are masked as exercises. Roz and Bernie's little dog, Moses, is as horny as anyone else in the island home, humping the leg of Pam's blue- blood mother, Dina (Blythe Danner), then following up by mounting the Focker's cat–a feline who at one point succeeds in flushing Moses down the toilet (don't ask). Some crudely stale, sit-comish humor comes from the Bernie's custom of hanging a sombrero on the bedroom doorknob when he's busy "taking lessons" from his therapist wife.
This time around Ben Stiller's errors are not based on pratfalls but on his determination to ignore his future dad-in-law's instructions on the care of Jack's adorable grandson. Though told never to pick up the little boy when he cries and to keep him away from TV, Greg does quite the opposite, cuddling the kid when he bawls and letting the little boy use the remote control–where he stops browsing once "Scarface" comes on. All of this activity is captured by Jack, who has hidden a camera in the room.
Blythe Danner is sadly underused, but Barbra Streisand nicely displays her comic talents, particularly in the scene that has her kneading the kinks out of Jack's back and instructing the CIA retiree on methods of turning on his wife. In the previous story, everyone plays up to Jack Byrnes. This time, the Byrnes have been Fockered.
Rated PG-13. 114 minutes. © 2004 by Harvey Karten
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