FrancisPage

Reel To Reel:
Meet The Fockers

How It Rates: ***
Starring: Ben Stiller, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Barbara Striesand
Rated: PG-13
Red Flags: Language, Sexual References

Preconceived Notions: Meet The Parents was a gas.
The Bottom Line: Stiller looks lost in his own movie, but Hoffman steals the show.

Meet The Fockers, that sequel with the dirty name, only rates 40 percent on the rottentomatoes.com critics' tomatometer -- meaning only 40 percent of their compilation of newspaper and magazine reviews were favorable. So it seemed odd Fockers grossed $200 million in less than a month -- and much of that on opening weekend. I had to find out why.

The answer is simple: It's a funny movie. It's crass, repetitive, over-the-top and awash in cheap, crude laughs, but it's ultimately funny. Funny movies make gobs of money. You could say the same things about Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles, also one of the funniest movies ever made. Or Airplane! Neither of those films are considered cinematic art in critics' circles.

Here's all you really need to know about the plot. Greg Focker (Stiller), engaged to Pam Byrnes (Teri Polo), met his fiancee's stuffy parents -- Jack (De Niro) and Dina (Blythe Danner) in the first film. Now it's time for her parents to meet his: laid-back Floridians Bernie (Hoffman) and Roz (Striesand). So under one roof you have Jack, the uptight anal-retentive ex-CIA agent; Dina, the overpowered Hausfrau; Bernie, the liberal Dad who gave up his legal practice to raise Greg; and Roz, sex therapist for seniors. That's too much in one place, and we haven't even factored in Greg and Pam yet -- or everybody's pets -- or Little Jack -- the Byrnes' baby grandson who Jack has coached to communicate in sign language.

Naturally, the whole weekend is a set-up for one disaster after another, including Little Jack's first words, which will be impossible to leave in when the film is edited for television. Who's the parent who gave consent for this kid to learn how to curse at such a young age?

De Niro once again gets to mock his ever-present tough-guy aura as the constantly suspicious spook. But as amazing as he is to watch, the people having the real fun are Hoffman and Striesand as a pair of new-wave Jews -- especially Hoffman. He skates through each scene with the comic effervescence I remember from Tootsie two decades ago. Striesand is also intensely likable as Mother Focker (heh heh heh, I couldn't resist) even if you hate her off-screen politics.

Greg Focker doesn't seem to have learned anything from the first picture. He's still lost as to how to assert himself, still a male nurse, and still without the brainpower to break off a relationship where family values means giving prospective husbands a lie-detector test. And one wonders why Dina stays with a guy who's so uncompromisingly uptight. But silly me, we wouldn't have a movie if everybody was normal, now?

"Screwball comedy" is a term generally reserved for wacky films of the 1930's with generous helpings of physical humor and contrived situations. People loved them because they were a release from a rotten, Great Depression-era world. Meet The Fockers fits that description nicely, even down to its time of release -- in a divided America still smarting from the November election, disallusioned with the war in Iraq and aghast at Tsnumai damage halfway around the world. Everybody needs to escape sometime.