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Weekend Watch is here for you. Every Friday we’re going to recommend the best of what’s new to rent on VOD or stream for free. It’s your weekend; allow us to make it better.
What to Stream This Weekend
Movie: The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
Director: Noah Baumbach
Starring: Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, Dustin Hoffman, Elizabeth Marvel, Emma Thompson
Available on: Netflix
There is a character in The Meyerowitz Stories — Harold Meyerowitz, the faded sculptor and mercurial patriarch played with nimble prickliness by Dustin Hoffman — who constantly refers to artwork (his own and that of others) as “major” or “minor” works. Harold uses these terms to aggrandize himself and to assert his own expertise in his field. You hear those same terms a lot when evaluating filmmakers with long, well-populated careers. Such-and-such film is a minor Scorsese or a major Woody Allen. The temptation, I think, was to anticipate The Meyerowitz Stories as a minor work of Noah Baumbach’s, because it was headed to Netflix, where feature films go to die quiet deaths. Netflix is certainly trying to combat that reputation, and Baumbach might now be their secret weapon, because lo and behold, The Meyerowitz Stories is not only major Noah Baumbach but also one of the best films of 2017.
Baumbach holds an interesting place in the cinematic landscape. He’s a director whose talents are heavily weighted towards his screenwriting, but his films are as thematically cohesive as the most stylistically bold auteur. From Kicking and Screaming up through The Squid and the Whale to his recent collaborations with Greta Gerwig on Frances Ha and Mistress America, Baumbach’s films hold together as erudite examinations of neurotic characters and poisonous familial relationships; a filmography that feels like it’s grown and matured (and sometimes regressed) as you might expect a person to grow and mature (and sometimes regress). My conception of later (post-Squid) Baumbach has been that of a filmmaker whose sharp observations tend to come across as jaundiced (as in Greenberg) and his treatment of his own characters merciless or even mean-spirited (everyone in Margot at the Wedding), except when he’s collaborated with Gerwig. Having seen Gerwig’s upcoming directorial debut, Lady Bird, and observed how her generosity of spirit operates outside of Baumbach’s involvement, I had taken to chalking up the exuberance and sweetness of Frances or the infinite patience towards the characters in Mistress America to Gerwig’s redeeming influence. Baumbach remained a good filmmaker and a razor-sharp screenwriter, just not a particularly kind one.
Imagine my surprise, then, that The Meyerowitz Stories turns out to be an exceedingly generous and warm-hearted tour through all of Baumbach’s usual pits of resentment. Bad dads and sibling rivalries and the tyranny of idiot youth — everything I have always found heavy and bitter about the Baumbach brand — feel lighter than air here. I’m not sure if anything’s changed for him; I don’t think I need to know. Not when he’s telling family stories that feel this true, this deeply felt, and this buoyant. With the exception of the Gerwig collaborations, Meyerowitz is easily the most delighted I have ever been with a Noah Baumbach movie. Suddenly, I couldn’t be happier that Netflix is distributing the film, because I won’t have to wait to watch it again.
Working on a familiar canvas — cardigan-wearing Upper West Siders working in the arts and maintaining close but tense relationships with their relatively large and fractured family — Baumbach presents the Meyerowitzes. Harold is the persnickety old man, sharing a townhouse he can’t really afford anymore with his fourth wife, Maureen (Emma Thompson), who drinks too much, is a disastrous cook, and wants to sell the place and move to her country home in the Berkshires. Harold’s older children are Danny (Adam Sandler) and Jean (Elizabeth Marvel), from a second marriage that ended badly. Danny is a divorced dad to the college-bound Eliza (Grace Van Patten), while Jean is a somewhat strange woman verging on spinster-dom. We learn that Harold basically ignored the both of them throughout their childhood in favor of Matthew (Ben Stiller), his son from his third marriage. All of Harold’s children are a disappointment to him in one way or another — none of them followed his footsteps into the arts, for one thing — but the relationships are complicated. Matthew’s the favorite son, but he’s a money manager who moved to L.A. and doesn’t visit that much. Matthew’s relationship with his older siblings is awkward, but he and Eliza text often. Danny spends a lot of time with his dad, but Harold is a lot to take. Everybody overlooks Jean. Nobody trusts Maureen. Baumbach takes this setup with these intertwined and thorny characters and sets them loose on a story about art, New York City, and the way that illness and death have a way of exacerbating (but also slicing through the Gordian knot of) family tensions.
The multi-layered relationships of the Meyerowitz clan, their faded artistic talents, the impact of divorce, it all brings to mind Baumbach’s earlier work. Most specifically, it’s a reminder that Baumbach co-wrote the script to The Royal Tenenbaums. In fact, The Meyerowitz Stories sometimes plays like what would happen if Baumbach had directed The Royal Tenenbaums instead of Wes Anderson. In place of a whimsical telling of a fractured family’s story, you get dozens of overlapping scenes of conversation and confrontation among a family that’s simmering with resentments that they can’t ever seem to convey, even though they seem to be communicating with each other all the time. It’d be exhausting if Baumbach weren’t such a brilliant writer churning out scene after scene of loaded dialogue. Every line seems to contain something deeply true and sneakily hilarious at once.
The performances are wall-to-wall perfection. Just when you think it’s safe to write off Adam Sandler as a lazy, cash-grabbing actor, he turns in a performance like this one, turning his schlubby visage and angry outburts into a character who is fighting every day to keep from being the disappointment he fears he is. Baumbach gives him a layered character who gets to be a good son, a better father, and a stubborn man all at once, and Sandler delivers easily the most sympathetic and empathetic performance of his career. There’s a scene where Danny and Eliza sit at the piano and recall a song from memory that verges on breathtaking.
Stiller, meanwhile, is on a roll lately. Between this film and Brad’s Status, he’s cornering the market on mid-life self-reflection and playing characters who are massively unsympathetic on the surface but contain hidden depths. Matthew doesn’t show up until almost halfway into the film, and by then we’re conditioned to hate this favored son and money manager. But Baumbach isn’t interested in picking winners and losers here, and Stiller plays Matthew’s frustrations with his father with the right mix of woundedness and self-preservation.
In Harold, Dustin Hoffman gets easily the best character he’s gotten to play in two decades, likely back to his indelible movie producer in Wag the Dog. Harold is vain, passive-aggressive, and often oblivious to the effect he has on his children, but he’s also actively afraid of the erosion of his legacy. Hoffman is wildly funny in the role (for his running alone he should be winning awards), never overplaying Harold’s minor-chord villainy into something more than it is. It’s the quiet tyranny of a bad but not despicable father, where he’s always on the borderline between annoying and dastardly. Wag the Dog, incidentally, was the last time Hoffman was nominated for an Academy Award, and if Netflix has any awards-season acumen at all (and the jury is very much still out on that particular question), this would be a slam-dunk for his eighth career nod. He’s that good, and the character is that baity.
There’s is SO MUCH to love in this movie, I barely have time to touch on Elizabeth Marvel’s land-mine of a performance, lying quietly in the background of scenes waiting to throw in a perfect kicker or a moment of bracing pathos. Emma Thompson initially seems like a casualty of a script that doesn’t have time to give her character much in the way of dignity — she’s a drunk and an interloper and she’s maybe trying to sell Harold’s house out from under him — but even that gets turned on its head in the film’s final third.
There’s more! Grace Van Patten (who you might’ve seen in the Netflix film Tramps earlier this year) is wonderful and shares a great dad/daughter chemistry with Sandler. Candice Bergen gets one scene to remind you why she’s one of the best. Baumbach seemingly paged through his back catalog to include actors from all of his previous films, which turns into a fun and familiar kind of parlor game.
The Meyerowitz Stories ends up being very much like its twin themes of family and art. It’s warm at times, bracingly true at others, and it challenges you to re-examine what you usually think about its subjects. Noah Baumbach just directed a kind and generous family comedy, a major work for Netflix that ought to win awards, featuring Ben Stiller at his most likeable and Adam Sandler at his most affecting. Who could have expected?
