Meet the Parents isn’t trying to reinvent comedy. It just understands why meeting your partner’s family is terrifying, and it wrings every awkward variant of that idea.
Ben Stiller plays Greg Focker, a nurse spending a long weekend at his girlfriend Pam’s family home. He plans to propose, so he needs her parents on his side. The problem is her dad, Jack, a retired CIA man who decides within minutes that Greg isn’t good enough. Things go downhill fast.
Robert De Niro is the secret weapon. He plays Jack completely straight and never winks at the audience, so every joke hits harder. The lie detector scene and the “Circle of Trust” bit are still hilarious, and there’s a reason people keep quoting them. Blythe Danner is a lot of fun as Pam’s mom, and Teri Polo makes Pam easy to root for.
Stiller is likable as the nervous guy you want to see win, but he spends most of the movie reacting. That’s the point. It also means the biggest laughs usually go to the people around him.
Director Jay Roach (of the Austin Powers movies) keeps things clean and simple and the story runs on a familiar track: one disaster after another until everybody makes up. By the fourth or fifth humiliation, you can see the next one coming. Still, the ending is nice and sweet.
I don’t think about this one much between watches, but whenever it comes on, I’m happy to sit down with it. It’s an easy, cozy night in that does exactly what it promises.
