THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES (NEW AND SELECTED) (Noah Baumbach). 110 minutes. Available Friday (October 13) as a Netflix exclusive. Rating: NNNN
I should preface this review of Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories (New And Selected) by pointing out that I really like Margot At The Wedding and Greenberg, which are the films of his that everyone supposedly hates.
Those movies are almost unrelentingly vicious in their depiction of miserable people Margot was the movie where Baumbach came up with his dramatic koan “hurt people hurt people,” as sharp and true an observation as anything ever written in the English language. And after a run of lighter fare including Frances Ha, While We’re Young and Mistress America, it’s bracing to see the writer/director returning to the caustic family dramas of Margot and his 2005 masterpiece, The Squid And The Whale.
And, boy, is The Meyerowitz Stories (New And Selected) caustic. Dustin Hoffman’s aging sculptor Harold Meyerowitz – a bloviating never-was who comports himself like a living god, dispensing judgment on all he surveys – could be the long-lost father of Jeff Daniels’s monstrous academic in The Squid And The Whale. (They even have the same beard.)
Perpetually discontent and ever on the lookout for a new slight, Harold exists to suck up all the attention in a given space – and always has. This, of course, means that his adult children Danny (Adam Sandler), Matthew (Ben Stiller) and Jean (Elizabeth Marvel) are all deeply broken in their own very specific and uncomplementary ways. Putting them all together, whether for a gallery opening or a family health crisis, is a very bad idea.
The Meyerowitz Stories, arriving on Netflix this week after playing the Cannes and New York film festivals, follows these characters, along with Harold’s alcoholic fourth wife, Maureen (Emma Thompson), and Danny’s teen daughter Eliza (Grace Van Patten), as they weave in and out of one another’s lives, arguing and reconciling and arguing again as they try to escape the event horizon of Harold’s self-absorption.
If the scenarios in which Baumbach places his actors are a little on the creaky side, the performances are exceptional. Hoffman shuts down his recent tendency toward impishness to play a monster oblivious to the emotional damage he’s wrought (which, of course, makes it even worse), and Thompson is terrifyingly good in her specificity as Harold’s current wife, an alcoholic who badly disguises her boozing with an affected jocularity that fools absolutely no one.
Stiller and Sandler capture the awkward physicality and quick-igniting anger of estranged siblings, and relative newcomer Van Patten (Tramps) is frankly amazing as Eliza, who’s having trouble reconciling her experience of her relatives with their versions of one another, and also trying to define herself outside the family as an artist in her own right.
The nature of Eliza’s art might seem a little easy to some viewers, but I’m pretty sure Baumbach knows what he’s doing with that. The guy always knows what he’s doing. It’s kind of scary.
