In
Meet the Parents, Jack Byrnes (played by Robert
De Niro) is a retired Central Intelligence Agency interrogator,
though he tells his family that he is a rare flower dealer.
His requirement that everyone in his family must be a part
of a "circle of trust" and tell no lies drives his children
nuts. His son Denny (played by Jon Abrahams) secretly smokes
pot and decorates his room in a counterculture mode. His daughter
Pam (played by Teri Polo) has had many boyfriends over the
years, but none has been good enough for Jack, so she moves
to Chicago to find a life of her own as a preschool teacher
at Harmony School. In due course Pam meets emergency room
nurse Gaylord Focker (played by Ben Stiller), whose nickname
is "Greg" (not "Gay"). They fall in love, and Greg is about
to propose when she indicates that her father’s approval,
though not required, is a plus in the impending marriage of
her sister Debbie (played by Nicole DeHuff). Accordingly,
Greg and Pam fly to La Guardia Airport for a weekend with
her parents in their house at Oyster Bay, Long Island. As
filmviewers who have seen the trailer for the film already
know, the weekend is a comedy of errors, starting when Jack
asks Greg how to pronounce his name "Focker." Greg’s missteps
produce hilarious disasters, ultimately resulting in Jack’s
order to Greg to leave the house, and he returns to LaGuardia.
At this point there is a coup in the power structure of the
family. Pam and her mother Dina (played by Blythe Danner)
insist that Jack has been a cad and must retrieve Greg lest
Pam become a spinster. The intention of Meet the Parents,
directed by Jay Roach, is thus to satirize the custom of having
parents screen a prospective son-in-law before financing the
wedding and giving away their daughter. Conventional heterosexual
customs have never looked sillier, but of course the aim of
the film is to be silly, albeit while reminding wives that
they can really be more civilized than their eccentric husbands.
MH
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