Noah Baumbach’s new movie “The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)” may soon be streaming on Netflix, but it feels like something you might watch a faded print of in some cramped Greenwich Village theater of days gone by. Portraying the pain and pathos of the neurotic progeny of a New York sculptor whose career peaked in the 1970s, “The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)” benefits from the same lighter touch Baumbach’s direction has shown since “Frances Ha” while also delving into the messy family drama that powered “The Squid and the Whale,” resulting in a work both mature and funny that deals with heavy issues yet is not weighed down by them.
Dustin Hoffman plays Harold, the difficult patriarch, Adam Sandler plays Danny, unemployed but a devoted parent to a college freshman, Elizabeth Marvel plays quirky, quiet Jean, and Ben Stiller plays Matthew, the favored half-sibling who’s found wealth in Los Angeles. Before its debut on Netflix, the movie is playing at the New York Film Festival where Baumbach made an appearance to discuss the ideas on family that gave birth to the movie and the process he took in bringing it to the screen.
On the origins of the idea
While Baumbach has made films about families, he began his writing process this time by focusing on the theme of brothers and he quickly decided on the actors. “I’ve worked with Ben obviously before and Adam had called me a few years ago and said, ‘If you ever have anything, call me.’ Which usually in my experience, when actors do that, then I’ll offer them something a few years later and they’ll say ‘Sorry I just didn’t respond to the material’. So I was girding for that, but I had an idea, the three of us had lunch together and talked about them playing brothers,” he explained. “I had wanted to do something about brothers, it kind of goes back to ‘The Squid and the Whale,’ where I had started that movie writing from an adult perspective and scrapped it to go back and write from the child’s perspective. Really the only thing we came away with was that they should fight, there should be a physical fight, so I reverse engineered the movie from that.”
Baumbach may have been joking about the reverse engineering, but the fraternal fight is a great scene, ending with a hilarious smash cut to an ill-fated public speech.
The filmmaker also elaborated on the family dynamics he hoped to capture in response to a question about character dictating story or vice versa. “More in the past I would say, the character dictated what the story became, I think on ‘Frances [Ha],’ I started feeling more comfortable having structure kind of help understand the character. In that movie it was because she kept switching locations, so it was the homelessness of it that informed a lot of who that person was and in this movie it was really thinking about the compartmentalization of family,” he said. “This idea of half siblings, which can both be totally meaningful or totally meaningless, and different families and who got what and that also spoke a lot to Harold. I think Harold probably gains a lot by keeping them apart. If they ever got together and talk, they’d overthrow him, which kind of happens. That helped to inform who these people were and the idea of Matthew’s character being spoken about in the story, before you see him, you already kind of know that guy before you even meet Ben. I think in this movie anyway, that really helped me figure out who these people were.”
While none of the Meyerowitzs are writers, the literary flavor of the title is a clue to how Baumbach conceptualized the family. “I thought of it in the writing as a collection of stories that an author might have published separately, this one was in the Paris Review and so on, that were collected and put together and of course I designed it as a complete meal, but that was for me the backstory of it. So I broke it up into short stories was the idea. I was thinking of authors who have returned to the same family over time. There’s a John Updike collection I read about the Maples family which I found very affecting and the early stories are them when they’re younger and then they get married and have a family and the later stories have them breaking up. I found something extra moving about the fact that these stories existed in real time and weren’t preordained and there was something very sad to me that he arrived at these conclusions for these people that he didn’t necessarily have when he published the first story.”
Another inspiration was to capture a certain hospital experience that Baumbach felt he hadn’t seen represented before. “One of my principle things that I wanted to do in a movie was do something in a hospital. Something I felt I hadn’t really seen in a movie before was a certain aspect of being in a hospital, how you are at such a vulnerable time in your life and at the same time you put so much on these people around you and you want to believe that that’s the best nurse and so on. I didn’t know how that was going to come into the movie and when I found the structure of it and I broke it up into the various stories in my head, of Danny and Matthew, separating the brothers and not having them come into the movie until later, in some ways I backed into the scope.”
On the the Meyerowitz family treating Art as Religion
The great Mike Nichols may have passed on, but he still had the funniest line of the day via an anecdote as Baumbach moved into the idea of the values of the Meyerowitz family.
“Something that Mike Nichols said to me when I first met him after he saw ‘The Squid and the Whale’ was ‘It reminded me of why I got into movies in the first place, which was revenge.’ One of the million great things Mike said about everything,” the director shared. “I think it’s true in all my movies, there are different emotional states that fuel things. I think in this one, sure there’s anger in it, but there’s love. I felt it was a hopeful story, about how family can kind of define things – parents define things for kids and you create a kind of rule book, a hierarchy of what’s important and what’s not, I always felt that for this family, art took the place of religion. As Ben’s character said, ‘We were brainwashed.’ There is a kind of deprogramming that goes on for adults and I wanted to create an interesting story that would maybe bear that out.”
A central idea in the movie is the children needing to escape the values of their father to find sanity. Baumbach later returned to the idea what Harold taught his children to care about.
“Families kind of define their own notions of success. In that family, it’s clear what success means [art], so anything short of that… I mean Matthew makes money but feels like a failure because he’s not an artist. Danny is a wonderful parent but because he failed as an artist, he feels like a failure. That notion that being a great parent means zero success, parenting is just not valued in the family. To different degrees we all carry these things out into the world and have to contend with them. For them too, this idea of trying to parent not like your parent – what I think makes Danny a wonderful parent is that he parents from himself, he’s not actually trying to correct, at least consciously. Again I think of art as religion in that way, it’s above everything for this family. They even give Harold the opportunity to be a good father and he doesn’t value it, he doesn’t even value it enough to fake it.”
