Noah Baumbach (2017)
The territory of his films is so familiar and their quality so dependable that Noah Baumbach is at increasing risk of being taken for granted. I chose to forego his latest at the London Film Festival: seeing The Meyerowitz Stories just a few days later made me more sharply aware that, except for 120 BPM and perhaps Mudbound, Baumbach’s film beats anything that I did see at LFF. As its name suggests, this comedy-drama is formally episodic but its picture of the titular New York family develops and richens continuously over the course of these episodes. The pivotal figure in the story is the elderly paterfamilias Harold Meyerowitz (Dustin Hoffman), who didn’t become the renowned sculptor he was all set to be. Harold’s self-esteem is undiminished, even magnified, by the world’s failure to appreciate him. Baumbach explores, instead of the familiar tyranny of the recognised creative genius, the more insidious tyranny of a fameless counterpart. At the opening of a new exhibition by his more successful contemporary L J Shapiro (Judd Hirsch), Harold breezily dismisses L J as ‘popular but minor’: Olympian judgments are meat and drink to Harold, and extend well beyond fine art. Although each of his middle-aged children – Danny (Adam Sandler), Jean (Elizabeth Marvel) and their half-brother Matthew (Ben Stiller) – finds him reliably infuriating, all three have tended, if not always consciously, to take their father at his own high estimation.
Harold is onto his fourth wife, Maureen (Emma Thompson), a ditsy unreformed alcoholic. We also meet – more briefly but memorably – Maureen’s immediate predecessor Julia (Candice Bergen), who is Matthew’s mother. Julia has only one significant speech, in which she regrets her faults as a parent. Harold, with infinitely more to say in the course of the film, utters never a word of self-reproach. He tends to use Matthew’s professional success as a stick to beat Danny with – that’s how it seems at any rate to Danny, a musician manqué who’s recently split from his wife and moved back to his father’s Manhattan home. Yet the younger son – visiting from Los Angeles, where his financial consultant work seems to be going better than his marriage – is no less frazzled than the elder: Matthew is ‘tired of apologising for doing well’. As for the glumly hectic, solitary Jean, Harold seems hardly to notice her. When he falls seriously ill and his three offspring go on a hospital visit, they see another elderly man in the car park; Jean reveals that, when she was a young girl, this old friend of their father’s exposed himself to her. Danny and Matthew spring into exuberant avenging action, not on the geriatric himself but on his car. Their sister’s exasperated, deflating response is ‘I could smash every car in the parking lot and burn down the hospital and it wouldn’t unfuck me up’. For the audience, her childhood revelation comes as a shock but not a surprise. It was already clear that Jean is the family member most likely to be overlooked.
All this makes The Meyerowitz Stories (the mildly irritating parenthesis of the full title is best ignored) sound much more miserable than it actually is. This is partly because the predominantly acerbic exchanges are written and played acutely and wittily, and partly because the overall situation is far from hopeless. For a start, there’s Danny’s daughter Eliza (Grace Van Patten), in her freshman year at Bard College, an institution where Harry once taught but which has more recently insulted him with its plans for a retrospective of his work as part of a (perish the thought) group show. Eliza thrives at Bard, where she makes soft-porn arty shorts, typically starring herself and occasionally with a supporting (non-porn) role even for her aunt Jean. Unlike any of her older relatives, Eliza is balanced and content – thanks to a generational distance from Harry’s influence and, more importantly, to the fact that, as Nathanael Hood suggests in his review of the film on the Audiences Everywhere website, ‘Danny has somehow managed to overcome Harold’s tyrannical parenting to become the loving, supportive father he always needed’. More generally, Noah Baumbach and his high-powered cast do an admirable job of animating the co-existent bonds, rivalries, affections and resentments that fuel family relationships. The Meyerowitzes are, in accordance with the opening sentence of Anna Karenina, distinctive and expertly shaped for entertainment but they’re essentially recognisable too. For the most part, Baumbach refrains from over-resolving things either sentimentally or bitterly. When Harold’s children occasionally lose their inhibitions enough to express their feelings – Danny and Matthew vandalising the car, or coming to blows with each other – it provides an instantaneous release of tension but no kind of solution.
Critical praise for the acting has centred on Adam Sandler’s Danny – on how amazingly good, in the light of many terrible performances, Sandler is. I can’t share this view, not because he’s not good – he is, very – but because this is still only the second time I’ve seen Sandler and he was good the first time too, in Funny People (2009). I’ve seen Dustin Hoffman much more often but I’ve rarely seen him better. In his eightieth year, Hoffman has a masterly blend of brio and control: the monstrous Harry is one of his most satisfying creations. Noah Baumbach succeeds again in exploiting Ben Stiller’s unusual talents. Stiller has an agonised superficiality that’s winning – and touching, when Matthew breaks down in a speech about his absent father at the opening of the Bard retrospective. (This takes place shortly after the fisticuffs between Matthew and Danny; it’s a daft joke, and a pity, that Baumbach has the well-groomed Matthew still bearing the traces of a bloody nose when he delivers the speech.) The women in the cast don’t have the same opportunities as the men: the relative underwriting of Jean is an unfortunate echo of her lack of identity in the family and may explain the sense of strain in Elizabeth Marvel’s playing: the actress rather than the character seems anxious to assert herself. Marvel is much better, though, than Emma Thompson, whose contrived, unfelt kookiness as Maureen stands out in the wrong way. On the plus side, Candice Bergen’s Julia is very fine and Grace Van Patten does well as Eliza; in a smaller role, Rebecca Miller registers as L J Shapiro’s daughter. There are cameo appearances from Adam Driver (as one of Matthew’s LA clients) and Sigourney Weaver (as herself – a guest at L J’s private view). The link between dogs and unhappy events in Wes Anderson/Noah Baumbach cinema is back in evidence in The Meyerowitz Stories. At least in this case the canine is the cause of an accident – and to Harry – rather than on the receiving end of one. It’s the consequences of a fall out dog-walking that land the old sod in intensive care.
19 October 2017
