The Life Artistic with Harold Meyerwitz
Seen on Netflix
In Noah Baumbach’s latest, The Meyerwitz Stories (New and Selected), a tale of accidental family reunion, the characters seek distance from one another with the urgency of an atomic split.
They run from the Museum of Modern Art. They run from the hospital. They run into the forest.
We know how they feel. There has never been a Baumbach movie from which we, too, did not want to hightail it outta dodge. Not due to any fault in the films themselves but rather because we are always fearful that his vivisections of the unrequited...the unloved...and the unfulfilled will cut just a little to close to the bone.
Baumbach has been compared, in the pantheon of “New York” directors, to Woody Allen. But Baumbach is missing Allen’s romanticism and his sentimentality. His aesthetic is not born of an upwardly mobile middle class taking its children to watch Bacall and Bogart – his is born of the failed experiments that pulverized families in the subsequent generation. As such, there’s always something slightly unheimlich about Baumbach movies – a fear that he might uncover some lingering discomfort in some box never meant to be opened
He very nearly did so in The Squid and The Whale, a story of divorce’s impact on two young boys in the 1970s. He came close as well in Greenberg, in which a failed musician-turned-carpenter goes to house sit in California.
In Meyerwitz - and we say this with profound relief - he has added a touch more levity to his proceedings, without losing an ounce of the insight.
And so we find has-been sculptor Harold Meyerwitz (a bearded Dustin Hoffman), in full tux, running from an opening at the Museum of Modern Art. It wasn’t his opening, of course. He had arrived earlier to find himself rebuffed at the door until an intervention by the star of the evening, an old friend from the 1970s who is now lives in Brooklyn and dresses like a homeless person, To counter these indignities, Harold had boorishly insisted on telling everyone that Bard College (where else?) would be putting on a retrospective of his work (in fact, it’s a showing of work by several former professors), and further that a collector had made a generous offer for all his sculptures (in fact, it’s a gay couple looking to buy his house in the village and use the art in it as a tax dodge).
Still, eventually the shame of not being recognized; and then further of being asked, on account of his tuxedo, whether he was headed somewhere else after the opening, had proved too much. Harold is now fleeing.
In his wake, we find Danny (Adam Sandler), his sweet neglected son limping down the street. This is Sandler’s first great role since Punch Drunk Love and he very much delivers the pathos required – playing the piano with his only daughter before she leaves for her freshman year at Bard and struggling to restore his father’s relevance in the art world.
Also in Harold’s wake, metaphorically if not literally at this point in the story, are the favorite son Matt (Ben Stiller), business manager to the stars, and his only daughter Jean (Elizabeth Marvel, with grey, stringy hair), a girl so neglected that even Baumbach forgets to give her much of part until she finally asks, indignantly “Do you have any idea what it’s like being a girl in this family?”
The set-up will sound familiar to anyone who has seen The Royal Tenenbaums or The Life Aquatic (both co-written by Baumbach). But just as Woody Allen revisits the same themes while still managing to entertain, this latest rendition of the Baumbach Broken Family theme feels utterly fresh.
The Rolling Stones b-side ballads favored by Wes Anderson are here replaced by intimate swoonings for piano and voice by Randy Newman (his critical resurrection among hip millennials in full bloom). Gone, too, are the trademark Andersonian scene transitions that place the characters in a kind of doll house. Instead, Meyerwitz skips along using cuts so close to the action that the characters have barely done speaking before we are whisked away to another scene. (When Baumbach then switches to fade outs in the final act, we are genuinely caught off guard.) Finally, the hipster quirks of Margot Tenenbaum or Steve Zissou have been swapped out for tell-tale signs of a New York liberal - fundraisers for Chuck Schumer, feminist art films that anyone living south of Canal street might call “obscene,” and gourmet hummus pronounced like a Lebanese separatist group.
Baumbach enjoys poking fun at these northern liberal archetypes in the same way that readers of the New Yorker love to giggle at how the magazine spells “coöperate" - a loving mockery of the wedding roast variety. And even as non-New Yorkers, we can chuckle along too, all the while – and this is Baumbach’s great strength as a writer/director – recognizing in these damaged souls, stories that feel very close to our own.