In Meet the Parents, Ben Stiller plays Greg Focker, a nice guy with a rather unfortunate name, who is in love with a schoolteacher named Pam. Greg is on the verge of proposing to Pam when she receives a phone call from her sister who is about to get married. Overhearing that it's a good idea to ask Pam's father for permission first, Greg delays his proposal of marriage until he has met his prospective father-in-law. Very soon, Greg finds himself standing outside Pam's parents' house, and he already seems to sense that he is in for a weekend with a difference.
Pam's father, Jack, is played by Robert De Niro. It's not that Jack is an unreasonable man, he just has his own set of values and opinions which cannot be questioned. One of his opinions is that no man has ever been good enough for his daughter, and no man ever will be. Greg soon finds that he's going to have to be very careful this weekend. Pam starts by asking him to lie about them living together, and as we all know, once a lie has been told, it's very difficult to start telling the truth again. Instead lies build upon more lies until we end up saying ridiculous things that make us look insane. This is exactly what happens to Greg. It seems that every little thing he says is picked up by Jack, twisted, and thrown back at him in a very cleverly intimidating way, until his self-confidence is so undermined that Greg starts to feel like he's losing his mind. Although it's a comedy, Meet the Parents brilliantly shows what can happen to some one who is continually put down and ridiculed. If you're a nice enough person to stand by and let it happen, you'll soon find that the whole world seems to conspire against you until in the end you start going mad. And as Greg finds out, the more crazy things get, the more people put you down and blame you for all that goes wrong. Having a comical name doesn't help either.
As the weekend proceeds, Greg finds new meaning in the phrase "in-laws from Hell", and after quite accidentally setting their house on fire, painting their cat, and covering their lawn with faeces, he decides to leave, only to be greeted at the airport by a robotic flight attendant who finally causes him to snap.
I found Meet the Parents a little embarrassing at first, probably because so much of it rung so true, but I found it quite an enjoyable and entertaining film. The only problem I have with it is the ending, where Jack changes his attitude and warms to Greg. People like Jack don't change overnight, and it felt like the filmmakers were just bolting on a feel-good ending.