Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson star in Noah Baumbach’s latest comedy of New York family dysfunction.
Neuroses flow thicker than blood through the veins of the clan under analysis in The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), Noah Baumbach’s rambling, often stingingly amusing look at messy accounts being settled within a disorderly family.
Working firmly within the tradition of New York Jewish humor distinctively mined by the likes of Woody Allen, Neil Simon, Carl Reiner, Herb Gardner, Elaine May and so many others, Baumbach’s film for Netflix is more conventionally conceived than some of his best work but benefits from sterling turns from a wonderful cast, most notably Dustin Hoffman and, no kidding, Adam Sandler.Screwed up families have always served as writers’ most common grist for the mill since the Greeks, so if you’re going to mine that load you’d better be pretty good. And that’s more or less where Baumbach’s new effort rates. At first, it looks like it could possibly be even better than that, as the early stretch is dominated by the piece’s most compelling character, Dustin Hoffman’s Harold Meyerowitz, a cranky, quick-witted, thickly gray-bearded sculptor with a permanent chip on his shoulder over not being viewed as the towering genius he firmly believes himself to be.
He certainly hasn’t been a genius as a father. Oldest son Danny (Sandler) comes down to his dad’s apartment in the Village with lovely arts-minded daughter Jean (Grace Van Patten) to see her off to college at Bard, from which Harold has just retired after decades of teaching. A good dad, Danny’s been pretty much useless at anything else, including marriage: Now that their daughter’s leaving home, he and his wife are separating and Danny hopes to stay with his father and aging hippie wife Maureen (Emma Thompson), Harold’s third or fourth spouse, who he now learns are thinking of selling their place.
This is a family in which the members’ multitude of resentments and complaints erupt with the reliability of Old Faithful; Danny…
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