Directed by: Noah Baumbach
Starring: Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, Dustin Hoffman, Elizabeth Marvel, Emma Thompson, Grace Van Patten, Candice Bergen, Rebecca Miller, Adam Driver, Judd Hirsch
The Meyerowitz Stories is a painful look at an aging artist patriarch who has fostered dysfunction in his family for years. He is soon hospitalized and slips into a coma due to brain bleeding, leading to speculation that he will soon die. His children now have to pick up the pieces and reconcile their own issues with each other and their father. When I say painful, I mean it's painful for the viewer.
Writer/director Noah Baumbach has created some interesting, semi-autobiographical work about the family dynamic over the years, ranging from The Squid and the Whale (2005), to While We're Young (2015), and 2019's Marriage Story. The Meyerowitz Stories are the types of stories you zone out listening to. They may be of interest to the speaker, but the listener has to endure them with a pained, forced smile and an eye on the exit. This is quite an assembled cast for such a dull film. The actors do what they can, but their characters are motormouths talking about things we couldn't care less about. Baumbach seemingly wrote the dialogue as if he were being paid by the word.
We first meet Danny Meyerowitz (Sandler) driving his daughter Eliza (Van Patten) around New York trying in vain to find a parking spot in Manhattan. Possibly causing extra tension is that Danny will soon be staying with his father Harold (Hoffman) while Eliza spends the night before attending film school. The dailies Eliza sends to her family are practically porn. Harold is an artist who feels he never got his due in the art world and seemingly takes it out on others. Danny has felt the brunt of it, while resenting his half-brother Matthew (Stiller) whom he thinks was Dad's favorite. We learn Matthew, a successful accountant, has his own list of resentments against his father, as does their sister Jean (Marvel).
We learn what the resentments are and watch it all play out while checking our cell phones to see how much longer we have to endure this gab-a-thon. I'm certain every family has its share of issues similar to the Meyerowitzes. It doesn't mean these issues have to be filmed. Of course, the family isn't played by the likes of Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, and Dustin Hoffman either. This is a colossal disappointment.
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