At the Q&A following a recent screening of The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) at The New York Film Festival, viewers professed to have seen themselves and loved ones in the story of a family immersed in the elder care of their father, Harold Meyerowitz, a narcissistic sculptor played to perfection by Dustin Hoffman. To say that his sons, –brilliant performances by Adam Sandler as Danny, and Ben Stiller as Matthew, –are engaged in the Freudian paradigm as rivals to each other in the grip of questionable parenting, is to describe in broad terms the specificity of Noah Baumbach’s fine script, and superb direction. Baumbach has made many movies since his memorable The Squid and the Whale, and this film follows closely, a next step in fictionalizing his own family story. As the writer Paul Bowles used to say, fiction must be truer than the table you can touch. By any measure of literary fiction, this film is a masterful rendition of a New York based family of our time.

Judd Hirsch, who plays a rival artist to Harold, was on hand at Lincoln for a stellar after party hosted by Netflix. His could have been a stock character, but as the movie unfolds, the curmudgeonly animus between Harold and L.J. Shapiro reveals a genuine friendship. Also present at Lincoln were Ben Stiller with his daughter Emma, and Adam Sandler with his brother. Baumbach said that he knew these brothers would have a physical fight and he worked his script back from that moment.

As the movie is so rich in family, interest in parenting and families spilled into real life. Sandler’s Danny grows in confidence through the film, but his parenting of Eliza, a standout Grace Van Patten, is never in doubt. Dustin Hoffman, who has successfully directed films, said he had a sensibility in common with Baumbach, both filmmakers insisting on many takes. Hoffman said he felt he was in the hands of an artist: “It’s hard being alive, and any work that can capture that, we should salute it.”

Regina Weinreich

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