Noah Baumbach pulls out his dusty notebooks from the Wes Anderson era and it shows. Former screenwriter of the director on La Vie Aquatique and Fantastic Mr. Fox, Baumbach applies his lessons well but struggles to surpass the masters in The Meyerowitz Stories, a family tragi-comedy carried to Cannes in 2017. We willingly take the game of the film, we easily recognize his family more or less distant, but the charm remains superficial.
Noah Baumbach introduces comedy with a title reminiscent of silent films: "Danny was trying to park. ". Yet The Meyerowitz Stories is far from silent. The tone is set by these titles delimiting the different chapters of the film, where we follow the different characters of the family, all endearing and reminding us of our own genealogy. Between dialogues of the deaf and situation comedians, Baumbach pulls all the strings of an effective comedy in a very pleasant lightness, accentuated by discreet and airy piano notes. The whole thing quickly brings to mind a pleasant and effective mix between Woody Allen and Wes Anderson.
Then Baumbach introduces tragedy, irretrievably linked to the character of the father. This tragedy is that of the complexity of relationships with others and with oneself, that of the impossible communication between beings of the same family. And that's why the subject touches so much: it's common to so many of us, underlying so many relationships. Through a well-controlled staging even if very obvious (the brutal cuts in the middle of the sentences gradually turn into classic fades to black), Baumbach captures these paradoxes of family communication but does not dare to go further, which gives the whole an approximate sincerity.He even goes so far as to force the line and attributes to the father a disease that damaged the part of his brain related to communication, in a psychosomatic enthusiasm a little bloated.
This is where Baumbach fails to surpass a Woody Allen or Wes Anderson. Even if the actors are excellent (Dustin Hoffman signs one of the most sincere roles of his career), the whole thing is sorely lacking in subtlety. This story of competition, voluntary infantilization and the problem of "home" is willingly transformed over the scenes into a cluster of scattered conflicts without real depth and the characters evolve only in a very predictable way in this ultimately unrealistic world. The photography of Robbie Ryan (who has notably worked with Ken Loach) is however almost naturalistic, in the literary sense of the term: with a very marked noise of the image and a randomly controlled light, the rapprochement between the subject and the image is finally quite wobbly and tends more to lose us than to really take us to the heart of this family.
In the midst of this race for legitimate filiation, however, there are some moments of grace that relieve this visceral suffering buried deep in each of the characters: the songs between father and daughter, then son and father, counterbalance with the violence in the actions (very moderate all the same) and the violence of the words, Much more raw because inherent to the characters. And while others acknowledge their mistakes in a musical silence and a scene without any cuts, which takes the time it deserves, the Meyerowitzes wait until it is too late to express their doubts and vital needs.
The film follows a fairly classical course, to finally ask the question of the idea that one has of oneself and the idea that others have of oneself, to arrive at the conclusion of an art that would replace words and even identity. Because if the father suffers from this lack of recognition in relation to his art, he is nevertheless defined for 1h50 by the prism of his works and his talent (or non-talent). The last time we see him, he is no more than a label affixed to a box surely containing his work.
Through this sealed box, communication is definitively closed and the legacy of speech is only found in a "conversation guide for the end of life", with overrated sentences and without feelings. The Meyerowitz Stories fails to deal with these complex family issues with depth and sincerity, but is nonetheless a pleasant comedy that is more easily digested than a family meal.
Trailer The Meyerowitz Stories:
