A writer on both Meet the Parents and its sequel, Meet the Fockers, director and co-writer John Hamburg is already well versed in the comic possibilities of that excruciating first encounter between potential in-laws and prospective son-in-law. Here he approaches the uproarious culture clash between the strait-laced Fleming family from Michigan and their daughter’s tattooed hipster tech billionaire boyfriend, Laird (James Franco) with a relish that shows in a wealth of perceptive sight gags, and a whiplash comic timing that only flags at the end of the final act.
Ned Fleming (Bryan Cranston), the well-loved boss of a printing company in Grand Rapids, is celebrating his 55th birthday when a Skype call from his Stanford student daughter Stephanie (Zoey Deutch) reveals a little more about her life than he had bargained for. Specifically, it reveals a secret boyfriend, and, mortifyingly for the buttoned-up Flemings, it reveals his naked buttocks, cavorting around her dorm room. Ned, his wife, Barb (Megan Mullally, excellent), and son, Scotty (Griffin Gluck), decide to spend Christmas in California in order to meet the new man in Stephanie’s life.
Franco is a riot as Ned’s worst nightmare: part unfiltered id, part priapic puppy, he’s given to the kind of huggy, over-sharing intimacy that fills a small-town, meat-and-potatoes man like Ned with visceral horror. Even worse for the proud but struggling proprietor of a printing company is the fact that Laird’s slick hi-tech house is “paper free”. And yes, that includes the bathroom. An extended scene in which Laird’s estate manager and self-defence trainer Gustav (Keegan-Michael Key) fixes a malfunctioning automatic toilet is mortifyingly funny.
It works as well as it does for two reasons. First, the details of Laird’s tech-funded play pad are brilliantly observed. Few things have made me giggle so much in a cinema this year as Laird’s absurd art collection. Second, although Ned and Laird are at odds, neither is portrayed as a monster. They are both inherently decent men, just positioned at opposite ends of a very broad spectrum.
And if the film drags a little at the end, it’s perhaps because the film-makers were enjoying the company of these characters as much as the audience undoubtedly will.
