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Meet the Fockers Subhash K Jha
Movie
Meet the Fockers
Director
Jay Roach

By Subhash K Jha


Starring Robert de Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand, Blythe Danner, Ben Stiller, Tero Paolo

Directed by Jay Roach

Say what you will, but this sequel to a very successful 2000 comedy Meet The Parents about a father who can't bear to see his daughter go to an "unworthy' suitor, is funnier, wiser, wittier and more engaging than the earlier film.

Of course the fantastic star cast helps. But there's more here. A sense of bonhomie and a zaniness epitomized by the amazing Barbra Streisand making a come back after years away from the camera. She plays Stiller's kooky mom offering sex therapy to geriatics, showing her son's in-laws' how to loosen up. She's a treat.

By her side is the amazing Hoffman. Having played an oeuvre of roles that have comfortably placed him among Hollywood's all-time greats Hoffman plays Streisand's crass but lovable husband with a lipsmacking relish.

Jay Roach's direction is so impulsively and intuitively unhampered by any selfconscious design to be funny that you end up laughing. There's a sense of immense pride and affection in the plot's rather curvaceous journey, as the protagonist Jack Byrnes (de Niro) goes from pompous selfregard to fun-and-frolic with his daughter's in-laws.

Some of the film's funniest interludes concern de Niro's efforts to house-train his infant grand-son. Such moments are marvels of blithe revellery. Restrained and yet riotous, controlled and yet comic, the film never loses focus of its farcical target and yet succeeds in rising pegs above its parodic parameters.

The lines are extremely well-written. They offer each of the super-accomplished actors a chance to shine beyond the ostensible inconsequentiality of the material. And I'm not talking about just the seasoned biggies. Even Stiller, straight out of his corny comic compulsions from a string of silly comedies, is very accomplished.

The best thing about Meet The Fockers is that it's a serious comedy although it doesn't try to be one. While putting the acting maestros in a parodic play-pen it gives them a chance to make pertinent points on the way families and individuals need to coalesce their egos into gregarious units.

You cannot help getting attached to these off-beam characters. Their quirks bordering on eccentricity make them the perfect metaphor for contemporary compulsions whereby family values seem to have become redundant when in truth they aren't.

Try laughter as the best medicine. And don't mind the jokes about breast-feeding. Life isn't always about walking the straight and narrow path.