Parents Just Don't Understand

With its economical title and gag-laden opening credits, Meet the Parents doesn't promise to be an acceptable invitation. Jay Roach's new film is another in the recently discontinued succession of high-gloss, marriage-minded bourgeois fluff like Father of the Bride and Betsy's Wedding. Here, though, the bride-and-groom dynamic is preempted by the prenuptial friction between the in-laws-to-be. My Best Friend's Wedding explored this avenue modestly enough in 1997-too modestly, in fact, for Roach, director of the Austin Powers pictures and a connoisseur of overkill.

But happily, he's found his footing in suburbia: Meet the Parents is the first truly funny American farce since Bowfinger, and if it lacks that film's localized wit and spit-and-polish wordplay, Roach and his sublime cast suffuse the material with an infectious slapdash zest all their own. The movie is a sitcom, yes, but an assured and well-oiled one, armed with knockabout charm and a lightfooted script by Herzfeld and John Hamburg (The Larry Sanders Show).

Ben Stiller, reigning prince of goofy jesters, reprises his undersexed Something About Mary shtick as Greg Focker, male nurse and paramour of Pam Byrnes (Teri Polo). A wedding-not their own, but of Pam's younger sister-summons the couple to the Byrnes homestead. It's there that Greg meets Pam's folks: sweet, matronly Dina, to whom there's more than meets the eye and Jack, a stern horticulturalist. Dina is played by Blythe Danner, currently best known for having birthed Gwyneth Paltrow. Jack is played by Robert De Niro, currently best known for having recently applied his talents to a prolonged spate of undeserving commercial swill (The Fan, Great Expectations, The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle).

De Niro's last comic outing was the overrated Billy Crystal vehicle Analyze This, a film as mechanical and sour as Meet the Parents is limber and blithe. In this looser milieu, De Niro appears visibly relaxed; his crisply delivered tête-à-têtes with Stiller achieve an unforced comic rhythm that Crystal too actively developed. Travis Bickle is wittier as a suburban patriarch than a conscience-afflicted Jimmy Conway, and when Jack's florist job is exposed as a guise for his true livelihood-as a CIA operative specializing in lie detection-Meet the Parents roars into giddy overdrive, with the hapless Greg finding himself suddenly subjected to polygraphs, random interrogations and bouts with the household cat.

Though director Roach found astonishing mainstream success with the glibly crass Powers franchise, Meet the Parents rarely stoops to similar crudeness (Greg's remarkable surname notwithstanding). Instead, it finds humor in its characters: Owen Wilson contributes a dry turn as Pam's former suitor, now a phenomenally successful capitalist, Polo proves an engaging foil and the steady unraveling of Danner's beatific Dina is a delight to behold. And Stiller and De Niro make eminently watchable sparring partners. The two stars, both generous comedians, concoct a zealous confrontational chemistry-and in doing so elevate this material from disposable froth to disarming entertainment.