Release Date: December 22, 2004
Starring: Robert De Niro, Ben Stiller, Dustin Hoffman, Barbara Streisand, Blythe Danner, Teri Polo, Alanna Ubach
Directed by: Jay Roach
Written by: John Hamburg, James Herzfeld
Distributed by: Universal Pictures
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (crude and sexual humor, language, a brief drug reference)
Meet the Fockers is like the class clown who unexpectedly gets a big laugh at one of his anonymous wisecracks; encouraged into thinking he’s worthy of a slot on Comedy Central’s “Premium Blend,” he continues to ham it up -- except that his jokes are uniformly unfunny, and some of them embarrassingly so. Meet the Parents was unexpectedly but deservingly the comedic hit of 2000, and that apparently emboldened director Jay Roach and the film’s producers into thinking a sequel was money in the bank. It may be, but it is not nearly as funny, saved only from disaster by a pair of strong, amiable performances from Dustin Hoffman and Barbara Streisand.
Fockers, written by John Hamburg and James Herzfeld, picks up about two years after Parents left off: Greg Focker (Ben Stiller) is still engaged to his girlfriend, Pam Byrnes (Teri Polo), having secured permission from her overbearing father Jack (Robert De Niro) in the first movie (he calls it “the circle of trust”). But before Greg and Pam can get married, they want their parents to meet. It is, naturally, a recipe for disaster, since Jack and Dina (Blythe Danner) Byrnes’s stiffly formal Long Island aesthetic is custom-made to clash with Bernie (Hoffman) and Roz (Streisand) Focker’s laid-back Florida Keys lifestyle.
The film limps along before Bernie and Roz come into the picture, firing off a string of jokes that reference Greg’s occupation (he’s a registered nurse) and the travel hazards that he faced in the first film (he had notoriously bad luck in airports). These are probably designed to bring those who haven’t seen Meet the Parents into the movie’s own circle of trust, but what they really do is reveal its affinity for bad comedy and screwball characters. As the movie opens, for instance, Greg has to deliver a baby for an Eastern European couple, a pair of ethnic caricatures whose funny accents are supposed to conceal the scene’s awful humor. There are also running gags involving Jack’s baby grandson, who talks in sign language, and the Fockers’ former housekeeper, Isabel (Alanna Ubach), who may have had a fling with Greg when he was a teenager. Meet the Fockers never stooped to that level.
It is with a nearly-audible sigh of relief, therefore, that the movie finally gets to the Focker parents. Hoffman gives an energetic, likeable performance as Greg’s dad Bernie, willing the movie back to life with an effortless comic nature that has served him well for the better part of the last 40 years. Streisand, another comedic veteran who makes her first screen appearance in eight years as Greg’s mom Roz, is also good for a laugh or two, generating believable chemistry with her son and husband. Together, the Focker parents are the best characters in Meet the Fockers, mostly because their eccentric, nontraditional ways (when Greg was young, Bernie was a stay-at-home dad, while Roz worked as a sex therapist) clearly grate on Jack’s nerves. These scenes are the film’s best shot at replicating the awkward, overly-polite moments that made Meet the Parents so funny.
But original humor is what makes for good comedy, not the secondhand gags that this movie pulls. Most of the jokes in Meet the Fockers are recycled from the original: the backyard game of touch football that turns suddenly competitive, resulting in injury, echoes the volleyball match in Parents, to name one example. And, like a mediocre political candidate seeking office, Meet the Fockers softens its edges into a tastelessly moderate mush: Since we know that Pam will not dump Greg because her father disapproves, his starchy approval is no longer something Greg really aspires to gain. The movie turns Jack into a villain, outright; he is the only character resisting the others’ vaguely wholesome goal of bringing the Fockers and Byrnses together under one roof in a new circle of trust (though Jack’s secret plan -- to uncover damning evidence that Greg fathered a child with Isabel -- inadvertently results in the movie’s funniest scene, when Greg gives a toast to a group of family members while under the influences of a truth serum that Jack injected into him).
The happy-ending results are inevitable, just as they were in the first film, and having seen Meet the Parents, I feel that Meet the Fockers has violated my circle of trust in making me sit through a watered-down version of the same story. They say that no good joke goes untold again, and this is never true more often than in Hollywood. But it’s the unexpected ingenuity of true humor that draws laughs. That’s something that no movie, however star-studded, can duplicate -- and like the class clown in the back row of the lecture hall, the harder it tries, the worse it gets.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)