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It's still playing festivals and special screenings (such as at the 3rd Annual Wisconsin Film Festival and at the ongoing Starring Chicago series at the new Gene Siskel Film Center). This is due to a boon in interest from the recent big-budget Hollywood version. I haven't seen the latest even though I often enjoy the comic skills of Ben Stiller (deliriously on display in Flirting With Disaster) and Robert De Niro (never funnier than in his death scene in Michael Mann's Heat). The Hollywood Jay (Austin Powers) Roach school of comedy just ain't my bag, baby. Commercializing on the commercialization of their original film, the people behind the 1992 Meet the Parents offer the movie under the presentation: &Meet the Filmmakers (get it?). It's a veritable self-help seminar on getting Hollywood money and career boosts out of the selling of a technically independent (i.e. economically-strapped with no distributor) original "product." To be fair, the Q&A following the recent Chicago screening focused almost as much on the aesthetic around which the film was created - thanks to the presence of film critic Dave Kehr - as on the Hollywood back story around which the film's notoriety is constructed. That's a rarity after countless depressing Q&A sessions that suggest audience indoctrination with Entertainment Weekly, Premiere, and Entertainment Tonight industry "speak."
An interest in how comedy works drives each of these films. To qualify, I'll put it this way: I laughed harder during Meet the Parents, but I thought deeper during Tomcats and Town & Country. As Greg Glienna, the director, co-screenwriter, and star of the original Meet the Parents, explains his purpose: "to entertain" or "to make people laugh." But at what? And, more to the point, how? The issue of point of view is richly significant in all three films. Let's explore. On the narrative level, Meet the Parents is told from the point of view of a heterosexual male gas station attendant played by producer Jim Vincent. Vincent tells a cautionary tale that unfolds like some hetero male anxiety dream. The flashback even features a nightmare as a compressed montage of earlier images and sounds already presented in Vincent's narration of Glienna's meeting the parents of girlfriend Jacqueline Cahill. His writhing discomfort while sleeping on a couch matches our own deftly manipulated state in the movie theatre. Each of Glienna's fumbling, realistically handled mishaps culminate intensely, revealing (to the critical mind) a potential psychosocial basis for "situation" comedy: masculine insecurity. Now, note the way Armond White at the New York Press compared the two best Hollywood comedies of the year: "If Tomcats located screwball comedy's vulgar roots in adolescent male anguish, [Warren] Beatty and Chelsom here [with 'Town & Country'] find its extension in mature regret." Tomcats raised screwball form to near analysis of genre by finding a critical pornographic point of view--voyeurism, lewd silhouettes--that illustrate the projection of "adolescent male anguish." ("Damn hose!" is the funniest line of the year; laughter and thought reflect back on each other ad infinitum.) This perspective, drawn from director Poirier's background in straight porn, raises the level of spirited lowbrow satire to mature, romantic revelation. Quite a balancing act to go unappreciated by the critical mass.
Notably, Glienna gets his own chance to deadpan shock at the behavior of his girlfriend's fame-obsessed sister, played by co-screenwriter Mary Ruth Clarke, whose camp, feminine neuroses would be considered misogynistic if the film weren't so explicit about putting masculine neuroses on display. This style of rigorously worked out deadpan comedy is derived from Candid Camera, in contrast to the wild gesticulations expected of Hollywood's broad comedy. Thus, the humor, as in Candid Camera, is dictated by the spatial arrangement of the characters to the situation. This is true whether the reactions are garnered from those sitting around the dinner table when Glienna knocks the main dish to the floor or whether the reactions fly from room to room when Glienna clogs the toilet. Masculine insecurity comes from being viewed - and judged. As refreshingly and effectively as Glienna executes this "situation" comedy, it's not really good enough. One recalls the way that Brian De Palma exposed pop's manipulation of racial-sexual fears in his send-up of Candid Camera that opened up the 1973 Sisters. That was a deeply funny sequence only when we recognized our own manipulation. Meet the Parents doesn't challenge Hollywood conventions, as do Tomcats, Town & Country, and, on a more sophisticated level, Sisters. And, within the film's structures, Glienna may not validate, but also does not critique, the film's narrative point of view. The vaunted "realism" of the style and the regional (non-Hollywood) humor reveal that the point of view is Glienna's own. (Meet the Filmmakers, indeed.) During the Q&A, an audience member asked if the film was autobiographical. "Not at all," responded Glienna. The audience laughed, primarily because the mere volume of calamities performed by Glienna in the film are unbelievable. I laughed because I know that Glienna is gay. Maybe that's what makes the film so, if not autobiographical, then, personal. Who better knows, which is not to say understands, masculine insecurity than a gay man? If only that were the topic of the film. Now that he has the opportunity to bring his singular comic style to Hollywood via his Meet the Parents deal, Glienna will hopefully follow the tradition of Poirier and Chelsom--whatever the financial gambit. Glienna knows how "to entertain" and "to make people laugh," but he also must learn to make people think. |
The original Meet the Parents starred Emo Phillips (left) and Greg Glienna, here deciding to rent a porno for his future in-laws 
Robert DiNiro stars as the hard-to-get-along-with father in the new version of Meet the Parents
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