Have you ever seen a functional family
presented in a movie or a television show? Hollywood carefully
avoids normality, unless you consider the cloying blandness of the
Waltons or the Ingallses. Dysfunction means money, as proved by the
return of the hapless Gaylord Focker (Ben Stiller), this time with
his embarrassing parents (Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand) in
tow. Meet the Fockers is the only blockbuster of the 2004 holiday
releases.
Eccentric families are hardly new to
Hollywood. Change the sex and you have You
Can’t Take It with You (1938),
one of Frank Capra’s most popular films. Well, it was popular
in its time, winning Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director. In
this film Jean Arthur endures the embarrassment of inflicting her
very odd family on boyfriend James Stewart, who comes from more
conservative stock. Look for this one on cable.
Ben Stiller seems quite at home in
dysfunctional families, and he comes by it naturally. His real-life
parents are Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, and that could not have
resulted in a normal childhood. One of Stiller’s best films, Flirting with Disaster
(1996), saddles him with two sets of quirky parents: adoptive
(George Segal and Mary Tyler Moore) and natural (Alan Alda and Lily
Tomlin). Stiller sets out to find his real parents, and the journey
with his wife and child, the woman from the adoption agency, and two strange cops is a
comic odyssey that provides more genuine laughs than any other film of
the last decade. Director David O. Russell (Three Kings) is one of the
wittiest directors working today, but he may have committed career
suicide with the peculiar but vastly underrated I Heart Huckabees.
Stiller turns up again as one of several
children in a family of misfits in The
Royal Tenenbaums (2001). Gene Hackman
heads a stellar cast as Royal Tenenbaum, the estranged patriarch
who tries to lie and cheat his way back into the family. Hackman is
generally not thought of as a comedy actor, but this is one of his
greatest performances. Stiller plays his resentful son, who has
never forgiven his dad for stealing from him when he was a child.
Director Wes Anderson has already shown evidence of greatness in
his short career, and this is his best one yet. His current film is
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
Perhaps dysfunctional families are comforting
to people who are hoping to find that other families are worse than
their own. The closest thing to functional families we may ever get
from Hollywood are the Munsters and the Addams Family.
This article appears in Feb 17-23, 2005.
