FilmReviewUntil now, the only joke in general circulation about the German name "Focker" has been the celebrated legend about the legless air ace Douglas Bader addressing the pupils of Cheltenham Ladies College about his wartime exploits: "So this fokker comes at me from out of the sun..." "Shouldn't we make it clear to the gels," says the headmistress faintly, "that we are talking about a particular type of German aircraft?" "Indeed so," nods Bader, "This fokker was flying a Messerschmitt."
Now a refinement - if that is the word - of this has arrived with Jay Roach's amiable new sub-Farrelly comedy Meet the Parents, in which male nurse Greg Focker (Ben Stiller) has the weekend-from-hell at the house of Jack and Dina Byrnes (Robert De Niro and Blythe Danner), the parents of Pam (Teri Polo), the woman he loves and wants to marry. Jack turns to his wife in private and hisses: "Oh my God. Pam's middle name is Martha. That would make her... Pamela Martha Focker."
So he's called Focker, and there's the Martha line. But that's it. With a movie that so obviously recalls Stiller's performance in There's Something About Mary you can't help but wonder how the Farrelly brothers would have developed the Focker gag. It wouldn't have been with much more ingenuity exactly, but surely with much more of the essential tactlessness and repetition that justifies its inclusion in the script in the first place.
Either way, this reasonably amiable, watchable farce bears the same relationship to the Farrellys that Diet Coke does to the original. There is something low-sodium about it. As Dr Evil says to his son in Austin Powers 2, an earlier movie by Jay Roach: "Just one calorie - not evil enough!" It has the feeling, sometimes, of a TV pilot development of "Mary", in which the signature flourish of bad taste has been scaled down and the keynote of filth muted.
When Greg nervously arrives at Jack's house, he immediately gets into his bad books for not liking cats. In every other respect a ruthless martinet, Jack is embarrassingly soppy about the family cat, disturbingly named Jinx, and he even calls it by singing a version of the chorus from What's New Pussycat?: "Jinxie-cat, jinxie-cat, where are youuuu?" It's a nice cringe-making touch from De Niro, which he crowns by revealing that he has trained Jinxie to urinate not in traditional kitty litter but in the toilet itself. It sounds promising. But our expectations, simultaneously heightened and depraved as they are by Farrelly animal-scenes, lead us inevitably to yearn for some major grossout from this cat. Although Jinxie is integral to the plot, the much hoped-for awe-inspiring moment of horror never really materialises.
Ben Stiller gives us his distinctive prickly amour-propre in recognising yet resenting the foolish situations that he finds himself in: he can never totally be a good sport, and looks too much like a romantic lead to be an out-an-out clown. In this, he has something of Albert Brooks or Billy Crystal. But his comic presence has a disconcerting shrewdness and sourness sometimes, that was given full and appropriate expression in Stiller's performance in Black and White as the self-loathing crooked cop.
As the grim father-in-law, Robert De Niro is again straining for the Second Act in his career as the Grand Old Man of light-ish comedy. With his habitual rat-trap mouth expression, he radiates a certain menace, and certainly everyone that comes within his forcefield looks intimidated - and that may, I suspect, reflect the effect the great man has on the rest of the cast anyway. The funniest turn comes from Owen Wilson as Pam's absurdly wealthy ex-boyfriend Kevin, who apart from being hogwhimperingly rich is a talented carpenter - inspired by a major role model: "Who better than Christ?"
But his character, like everyone else in the film, is never quite allowed enough air to breathe. Meet the Parents is a film with lots of funny lines and actors doing an impeccable technical job, but it is somehow less than the sum of its parts. It strains to come to life, but never quite makes it.
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