In the first lines of the novel 'Ana Karenina'', Tolstoy writes the famous sentence: "Every happy family resembles each other, every unhappy family is unfortunate in their own way." For less than 150 years, we remain witness to the truthfulness of those words. The Meyerowitz Stories directed by Noach Baumbach's is a film about one such family. Over the past twenty years, we have had the opportunity to watch actors like Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller and Dustin Hoffman in many family comedies and drama. While earlier films went from extremely bad to very good, The Meyerowitz Stories still belongs to the latter.
The film is divided into four segments that follow members of the Meyerowitz family. Harold (D. Hoffman) is the head of the family, the artist and the central figure of each segment. In the first we follow his relationship with his son Danny (A. Sandler), in the second with his second son Matthew (B. Stiller). The Meyerowitz family is scattered everywhere, their relationships are distorted and relatively lucid. It will be merged again only when Harold falls into a coma, and the encounters that will be played around his hospital bed will lead to the truth that they have been pushing for a long time.
Baumbach brings a pretty exciting idea and a story that, from the very first minute, takes the attention of the audience firmly under its umbrella. However, this attention will begin to linger in the second half of the film. Namely, the director, as the basis of the film through which he will build the action, characters and tension, takes a dialogue. And there's nothing wrong with that. The dialogue aspect when taken alone acts very well. The lucidity of their relationship is reflected through the conversation. The change of topics and the dynamics of the conversation are running at a crazy speed. Sometimes they are meaningless, unconnected, they sometimes correspond to topics from before, sometimes replicas run parallel to each other.
But in all this, Baumbach makes one mistake. The dialogue largely forms the whole action of the film. Everything that happens in a movie happens in a dialogue. Characters do not do throughout the film, they just say. Everything that has been, what it is and what it will have to be is has to said trough words. Every sentence is of an exponential character. And because of that, the dynamics and attention that were initially interesting, in the second part of the film, assuming that most of the events unfold in a closed space, becomes relatively boring, which leads to the view that the film is much longer than it should be.
The Meyerowitz Stories represents a whole play of characters. What makes each of them distinguished is a special note of insanity. Harold is an artist, a sculptor, and has shaped his whole life according to the principles of art. His children - Danny, Jean and Matthew - also grew up according to these principles. But they were all victims of Harold's principles. Even he himself. All the characters are clever in their own way, but the very madness that is rooted in them brings instability to their rational judgment.
Films of this type, however, are not rare, and this is best known by the acting set by Baumbach. We didn't watch Adam Sandler in such a good release since Punch-Drunk Love and Reign Over Me. Although it appears in the spirit of some of its earlier characters, it still has depth and character. Ben Stiller worked before with Baumbach and he gives a standard and safe performance, without too much risk and difficulty. Dustin Hoffman is an interesting old man at the limit of senility, but again with depth. Particular highlight is the scene in which he sees Sigourney Weaver at an exhibition and the way he experiences individual events and how he later transforms them into memories. Elizabeth Marvel, who plays his daughter Jean acts as a minor character, and in moments when the director turns his attention to her, she brings a little freshness, but she's still down to the dialogue.
The Meyerowitz Stories, in spite of some drawbacks, is a very good movie. Baumbach serves us a warm and sympathetic story about the family of failed artists and their complicated relationships. The film is inspired by the atmosphere and magnificence specific to films that originate from Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums. It will astonish, laugh, worry, surprise, but most of all entertain. And even more than that.
This was my translation from Croatian to English from Ziher hr article ''Kvalitetno iskorišten potencijal: The Meyerowitz Stories'' by A.Bajrovic
