Like most married men, I'm pretty certain I won't forget that rite of passage known as meeting the parents for the first time. It was a slightly tipsy Thanksgiving dinner in suburban Denver after a sixteen-hour drive -- in a VW bus, no less. Like Greg (Ben Stiller) and Pam (Teri Polo), Ms scmrak and I were already living with neither benefit of clergy nor parental knowledge; like Pam and Greg, Ms scmrak and I became officially engaged on our trip. The whole affair was an ordeal typified by the inevitable "Not while you're under my roof!" ruling. But that trip's another, more interesting story -- and it's certainly far funnier than Meet the Parents, too.

The entire comic basis (if you accept the dubious premise that this movie is, in fact, a comedy) of Meet the Parents wobbles like an unsteady carnival stilt-walker on two distinctly unfunny themes. The first stilt is the persona of Pam's father Jack (played ham-fistedly by Robert DeNiro): a controlling, suspicious, manipulative, chest-beating social Neanderthal who's more devoted to the family cat than to his long-suffering wife (Blythe Danner). The second stilt, strangely for a visual medium, is based upon a sound gag -- Greg's last name. The "Focker" joke was not funny the first time it appeared; repeating it twenty-four times [by my actual count] did not raise its humor quotient by the end of the movie. And that his name appears unfamiliar (and therefore risible) to Pam's WASP-y family and friends is sure-fire evidence that he's Jewish; setting up more than a few unfunny culture clash gags. Yes, these stilts are wayyyyy wobbly, resulting in a movie that produces much more uneasiness in the viewers than mirth.

The audience -- in my case, a Continental 737-load of passengers 34,000 feet above the Carribean Sea -- was treated to 100 minutes of the theatre of discomfort. We were made uneasy wondering how dumb Pam actually is. We became uncomfortable wondering about how much stupider Greg's next blunder would be. We squirmed in our seats trying not to think about just how bizarre the next interaction between Jack and Greg would be.

It didn't work... no, non, nyet, nunca, jamais!

Slapstick comedy is probably the oldest form of comedy. When Urk saw Ugh slip on rotten fruit in their cave in the French Alps, performing the world's first pratfall, Urk laughed. And then he jumped up and ran to help his friend to his feet. The essence of slapstick humor is the juxtaposition of embarrassment against redemption; as in a Marx Brothers comedy where we learn in the last reel that Harpo is the smartest brother after all. Chevy Chase's Jerry-Ford pratfalls, seltzer in the pants, a pie in the face; they're all slapstick. The golden age of slapstick waned as burlesque comedians made their slow transition to television; its death came as stars like Lucille Ball and Red Skelton shuffled into the wings for the last time. After their departure, the comedy of the sixties and seventies strove to be more cerebral -- Bob Newhart's thoughtful monologues; the strange ponderings of Steven Wright; the so-called "Golden Age of Television."

And then came the eighties and nineties, when comedy movies stopped being thoughtful or slapstick, and began being bloody (Beverly Hills Cop), exploitive (Porky's), repetitititititititive (anything with Bobcat Goldthwaite), loud (almost anything with Bill Murray), or embarrassing (anything with Steve Martin). Instead of making low budget films with unknown stars and shaky plots; studios began making blockbuster-budget movies starring box-office idols... with shaky plots. Those plots, which many times turned on a single juvenile sight or sound gag, attempted to marry elements of slapstick comedy to thoughtful comedy. They failed miserably. Meet the Parents is but another in a long line of movies cast in such a sorry mold.

Films in the format of Meet the Parents perform disservice to the theater-going public. They place legitimate actors (DeNiro, Danner) in the awkward position of working outside those lines that have previously defined stellar careers, and they elevate sub-par talents (Stiller and moreso Polo) to the status of "stars," however briefly. DeNiro -- he of The Great Santini and Taxi Driver -- when caught on film in this comedy is stiff and dry, lacking that finely-honed comic timing that cannot be taught but must be learned. Danner -- by now typecast as a long-suffering wife, like her Prince of Tides part -- plays a role that is mercifully small, portraying a stereotypical bubble-headed suburban mother. In watching this film, though, one can certainly see where Gwynneth got her looks. Stiller, whose square-jawed face resembles a George Clooney left too long in the dryer, plays Greg looking eternally pained -- an expression he must have learned from watching too many Woody Allen films. His pinched visage calls to mind the "before" photograph in a laxative advertisement. Polo? well, she couldn't act her way out of a wet paper bag -- but she'd look good doing it, which is the sole reason she's here: to pander to the 16-26 male age group. Supporting parts are played by sleepwalking actors, obviously more for paychecks and resume credit than for art.

The script is worsened by stylistic waste: comic elements are introduced at random and then allowed to die before full development. A case in point is the character of the younger brother, who living the life of a wastrel right under the unseeing eyes of his otherwise omniscient father. Any potential humor in such situations remains un-mined; wasted in favor of another ten repetitions of the "Focker" joke or another potty joke about teaching a cat to use the toilet.

But worst of all, sophomoric films of this genre degrade the concept of comedy. Meet the Parents and its many kin do not qulaify as slapstick comedy -- slapstick simply cannot survive on such a sparse joke diet in a 100-minute time frame. It's not cerebral comedy; its gags are either too physical or too simplistic or both. It's instead the comedy of embarrassment: slapstick, stripped of its redemptive phase, piled on more slapstick in a never-ending spiral until the protagonist has dug the pit of his cupidity so deep he can never escape. Greg's a dog man, Jack's a cat man. Greg loses his luggage, rents the wrong kind of car, brings his cigarettes, flushes the wrong toilet, gets caught snooping, lets the cat escape, gives the sister a black eye, gets framed by the brother with a hash pipe, burns up the wedding altar, and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on... Any object portrayed as important to Pam's parents becomes an object for Greg to destroy or lose in another spasm of stupidity. Greg builds up so much karmic debt with nary a single small triumph that, by the point at which he is scheduled to be redeemed, no one in the audience can identify with him. We are apparently intended to laugh at this man's continuous idiocy, and -- of course -- are supposed to like him instead, to root for him against the father (who broadcasts his own waves of lunacy). Instead, Greg is so complete and so consistent a bumbler that he loses any sympathy, so when he succeeds at the end of the plot no one can bring him- or her-self to give a hoot.

I have a perfectly good relationship with my own in-laws, regardless of any small mistakes I may have made at our first meeting. But if I'd made myself a complete jackass like either Greg or Jack in this film, I'd be married to someone else today -- if I'd been able to let myself live.


Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: None of the Above
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older