The Meyerowitz Stories

The Meyerowitz Stories (2017)

Written and Directed by: Noah Baumbach
Nominated for Palme d'Or at Cannes Film Festival 2017
Streaming on Netflix.

It's a beautiful film about a dysfunctional family, exploring fractured interpersonal relationships. It has a very unique voice, even in the way it's written. It starts like an anthology, where the story of each child of the father is explored one after the other. Soon, it gets connected. The writing is very quirky, and it has a playfulness to it irrespective of how intense the subject matter goes. Noah Baumbach's films have an interesting tone - he explores intense drama and interpersonal relationships within artist characters. Perhaps, having artist characters makes writing easy for him, to make it more personal to him. It beautifully talks about the struggles of being an artist, about how "success" makes life easy and even your art seem better than otherwise. Through Ben's character, the explores the feeling of dissatisfaction irrespective of doing well in life - to the point of wondering what's even the point of doing well.

I loved the style of it, it comes and goes here and there - like the way he abruptly cuts when the characters are talking - it's him taking a stance against the rambling of the characters. It's so funny. It talks about how people don't express enough. How people feel unloved, simply because of lack of expression. For example, Ben Stiller feels that his father doesn't love him, and even cares about him but Adam Sandler's character tells him that he feels the same about himself, and he in reverse thinks that his father only loves Ben Stiller's character. Why? Because the father would talk good things about Ben's character to Adam's character, instead of directly telling him. Why would you do that? If you love someone, tell them that you love them instead of telling someone else how much you love them - and making both of them feel unloved.