Movie Review: The Meyerowitz Stories

the meyerowitz stories
Credit: Netflix

Premiere Date: October 13, 2017

Director: Noah Baumbach

Screenwriter: Noah Baumbach

Cinematography: Robbie Ryan

The Meyerowitz Stories is comedy-drama movie about Harold Meyerowitz, and his 3 children: Danny (Adam Sandler), Jean (Elizabeth Marvel), and their step-brother Matt (Ben Stiller). It has a different form that I’ve never (or once or twice) in cinema. It is divided into different pieces, each piece showing lives of different siblings or a different stage in their lives collectively. I liked it. It is about their old sculptor dad Harold (Dustin Hoffman) trying to feel appreaciated – feel like an artist in his show in New york when in fact he has a brain hemorrhage a few days later. The movie follows the quarrels between the siblings and their dad’s subsequent recovery.

I really liked their acting. It was raw, when the family members were fighting each other I saw family again. When they were talking over each other, not listening to each other, I saw my family again. The timing, the tone was perfect. I feel like I need to praise the scenario, kudos to Baumbach for writing especially the family scenes so natural. It felt real, like it can happen in that moment with my family. Plus, I really liked actors’ acting in emotional scenes. Stiller was perfect when he was crying in the art gallery, I was shocked because I only saw him in comedy movies where he didn’t have such scenes. I felt those emotions, that feeling of sorrow and regret. I can say the same thing for Sandler, he is famous for his comedy movies but his emotional scenes were really good too. The character’s anger, and frustration was evident in his eyes.

As I said above I liked the narration style of the movie (having different pieces) but I don’t think it was used properly (or I don’t really know what that technique really is). In the movie, there were different parts relating to Danny, Matt, Jean, etc. I guess this is the reason why it has the “stories” part in its name. A title page showed up everytime the movie was moving onto a new part, but the parts were continuous. For example Matt’s part was continuous with the story told in Danny’s part. I, of course, expected the stories to align with each other but was expecting different stories uniting each other at the end or near the end, not every piece to continue from the previous part. I didn’t think those title pages for every different part was needed, it was unnecessary. Though I wish it was done the way I expected because those kinds of movies make me really curious as to see where they’ll connect or unite with other stories.

One thought on “Movie Review: The Meyerowitz Stories

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