Indecent proposal

There's something about Meet the Parents

by Peter Keough

MEET THE PARENTS, Directed by Jay Roach. Written by Jim Herzfeld and John Hamburg. With Ben Stiller, Robert De Niro, Teri Polo, Blythe Danner, Nicole Dehuff, Jon Abrahams, Tom McCarthy, Phyllis George, James Rebhorn, and Owen Wilson. A DreamWorks Pictures release. At the Copley Place, the Fenway, the Fresh Pond, and the , and the Circle and in the suburbs.

Most trailers for upcoming comedies give away all the punch lines. Not the one for Meet the Parents, director Jay Roach's ambitious follow-up to his Austin Powers hits. The jokes are fairly amusing, but it's like hearing a catchy phrase or two from a symphony. More than any film in recent memory. Parents takes a simple gag and builds on it, following it ad absurdum to its logical conclusion while constructing a fugue of hilarity.

The premise (like that of all great comedy) derives from a fundamental human weakness -- in this case, the need to lie to one's future in-laws. Greg -- his last name becomes one of the film's more tasteless standing jokes -- is a nerdy male nurse who's in love with the beautiful, gifted, and intelligent Pam Byrnes (Teri Polo). And she loves him too, though not -- in the film's last moment of cuteness -- enough to ignore a ringing cell phone when he's about to propose. The call is an invitation to her folks' tony homestead in a white-picket-fence suburb, where Greg will undergo the title ritual. And since Greg is played by Ben Stiller, the screen's leading icon of comic male masochism, we know this will be no easy visit. Indeed, Stiller's tortures here are more exquisitely refined and subtly excruciating than those he endured in There's Something About Mary.

To begin with, his future father-in-law, Jack, is played by Robert De Niro. You may have noticed that as he's grown older De Niro has clung to many of the nastier aspects of such characters as Travis Bickle and Jake La Motta while retaining none of their joie de vivre. He brings insinuating menace and the suggestion of suppressed perversity to the well-to-do, hard-to-please Jack, a self-righteous prig who regards the would-be wooer of his daughter as something between a bad smell and the downfall of Western values. As it turns out, Jack is a former CIA operative, with an uncanny knack for uncovering falsehoods and an unhealthy attachment to Pam.

It sounds a little like the Andrew Bergman-scripted The In-Laws, but Jack is the anal antithesis of Peter Falk's laidback nutcase, and the film itself is much tighter and more sadistic. Greg's response to Jack's palpable hostility and the genial suspiciousness of Pam's mother, Dina (Blythe Danner, a good sport, even with a concealed camera aimed up her dress), is to make inappropriate, misconstrued jokes and tell feeble white lies that grow more compounded and grotesque as he vainly attempts to make a good impression. A simple fib meant to explain why he's studying a photo of a woman using a breast pump in a maternity magazine leads to an increasingly bizarre skein of fabrications; it ends with Jack proclaiming triumphantly at the dinner table, "I have nipples, Greg: could you milk me?"

Life is like that. What's more, the web of verbal deceit is paralleled by the conspiracy of the physical universe, where every inanimate object, however benign or innocuous, turns on the hapless and unwary. A bottle of champagne that Jack purchases to ingratiate himself with Pam's parents becomes (through among other things the intervention of a spoiled cat) the instrument through which the remains of his mother are desecrated. And a pack of cigarettes tossed onto a rooftop? It's like a loaded gun at the beginning of a Chekhov play. In his orchestration of the malicious mechanics of the inanimate world, Roach recalls silent masters like Buster Keaton.

Some of these gags fall flat, or in retrospect should. The weirdness may be too rarefied for those who prefer the cruder sensibility of the Farrelly brothers. And at the end, as at the beginning, the film feels strained when it goes for the heart -- its own heart isn't in it. Parents succeeds when it embraces the folly and the futility, from the awkwardness of simple social encounters to the profound disillusionment Greg feels when he realizes not only that he's excluded from Pam's world but that he doesn't want to be part of it anyway. This truth doesn't hurt as much as the infamous franks-and-beans scene from There's Something About Mary, but the pain and the laughter last longer.