“Noah Baumbach has always been a writer-director of no formal distinction, but he's possessed with a keen eye and ear for the intricacies of pettiness, humiliation, and schadenfreude,” begins Steve Macfarlane at Slant. “His new film, The Meyerowitz Stories (New And Selected), concerning a family of neurotic middle-aged New Yorkers attempting to come to grips with the imminent demise of their sculptor father, Harold (Dustin Hoffman), duly feels like a retread of past works (and not just Baumbach’s), if better structured and finer-grained than most. It appreciates life’s vastness and maddening repetition; its screenplay is emotionally sprawling but peripatetic in the telling. Baumbach makes a lived-in milieu feel instantly familiar as Danny Meyerowitz (Adam Sandler) and his teenage daughter, Eliza (Grace Van Patten), pause in the middle of their search for a parking spot to enjoy Fine Young Cannibals’s ‘She Drives Me Crazy’ on the radio, before the inevitable New York City honking and screaming resumes.”
“The bracing if oppressively acrid wit of mid-career works like Greenberg has merged with the emotional generosity of more recent (and comparatively trifling) comedies like Frances Ha to synthesize his sharpest and tenderest opus since his acknowledged masterpiece, 2005’s The Squid and the Whale,” writes Steven Mears for Film Comment. “The screenplay never figures out what to do with the dipso-boho stepmom (Emma Thompson), and a quirky sibling slap-fight and acts of cathartic vandalism feel borrowed from Wes Anderson’s bottom drawer, but in lovely moments like a father-daughter piano duet, Baumbach proves he’s capable of drawing tears as well as blood.”
We haven’t yet mentioned Ben Stiller. Mark Olsen profiles him for the Los Angeles Times: “Baumbach wrote the part of the driven, successful business manager in The Meyerowitz Stories with Stiller very much in mind, and he did the same for Adam Sandler in the part of his underachieving sad-sack brother. . . . Baumbach said the first few people he showed the script to, including Stiller, thought the roles of the brothers were intended for the opposite actor. ‘I felt like it was an opportunity for Ben to play something closer to who he really is,’ Baumbach said. ‘And when Ben clicked into that, I think it was very gutsy of him to reveal that on-screen.’”
Baumbach “moves beyond dramatization of familial passive-aggression and into maturity and analysis, telling a story about getting older, coming to terms with who these people are, and figuring out how to be your own person anyway,” writes Flavorwire’s Jason Bailey. “It’s an uproariously funny movie, and a genuinely tender and moving one as well.”
“The rumors are true,” Filmmaker’s Vadim Rizov assures us: “Adam Sandler (and everyone else) is excellent in this father-sons drama of potential reconciliation.”
VIDEO
The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) premiered in competition in Cannes and screens this evening and tomorrow night (October 2) as part of the Main Slate of this year’s New York Film Festival. Baumbach will be on hand for a Q&A this evening, and members of the cast join him tomorrow.
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