Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) sounds like a book you’d buy at an airport Hudson News because it had a Pulitzer finalist sticker on it and then abandon in the seat-back pocket by page 12. Unfortunately, it’s a film—one that plays like an emotionally constipated dinner party where everyone has a liberal arts degree and no one knows how to use a fork without making it a metaphor.
Released in 2017, The Meyerowitz Stories is Baumbach’s latest exploration of a subject he apparently can’t get enough of: neurotic, upper-middle-class New Yorkers fighting each other in emotionally stunted prose. Think The Royal Tenenbaums, but without the charm, the costumes, or any character you’d voluntarily make eye contact with at a PTA meeting.
Let’s begin with Harold Meyerowitz (Dustin Hoffman), a retired sculptor with the warmth of an unsanded mahogany bench. He’s the family patriarch, a man who measures his value in gallery rejections and how often his name gets mentioned at dinner. Hoffman plays him like someone who spent a weekend studying narcissism in a broken mirror. He’s petty, self-important, and allergic to compliments that don’t begin with “your early work.”
Harold has three children from multiple marriages, each one representing a different flavor of generational disappointment. There’s Danny (Adam Sandler), a broken piano of a man who still limps emotionally from his father’s neglect. He’s recently separated, unemployed, and walks through the movie like a guy trying to return a broken TV to a Best Buy that no longer exists. Then there’s Matthew (Ben Stiller), the half-brother and financial success story, who compensates for his trauma with a well-tailored suit and a permanent expression of passive-aggressive competence. Finally, there’s Jean (Elizabeth Marvel), who’s technically there but might as well be a lamp.
The three of them reunite when Harold falls ill—because of course he does. Nothing says “artsy family reckoning” like a health scare and an unpaid hospital bill. What follows is a series of vignettes where people talk at each other in curated outbursts and then walk away before anyone feels too much. It’s like therapy, but with worse lighting and no insurance coverage.
Each character gets their own “story,” a mini-chapter that adds up to one giant novel of unresolved daddy issues and faint applause. Sandler’s chapter involves yelling about his daughter’s college future, hitting golf balls into trees, and screaming in a parking lot. It’s supposed to be raw and cathartic. It plays more like a man arguing with a vending machine. Stiller gets his moment too, mostly involving spreadsheets, resentment, and a therapy session where he finally admits his father loved him “less aggressively.” Powerful stuff.
Jean, meanwhile, is the middle child and the family’s designated footnote. Her story includes an uncomfortable dinner and the revelation that she was assaulted by one of Harold’s friends, which gets about as much screen time as a misplaced coat. It’s a tragic subplot that gets swallowed whole by the film’s refusal to treat anything with actual gravity unless it involves a broken art career or a misunderstanding at MoMA.
The dialogue, as always with Baumbach, is crisp, hyper-verbal, and steeped in that particular brand of Northeast elitism where everyone talks like their therapist is just off-camera feeding them lines. The characters don’t speak so much as deliver essays between sips of wine. Lines like, “You think because you’re a financial planner that makes you emotionally solvent?” land with all the subtlety of a dropped martini glass.
The film tries very hard to be funny in that dry, observational, “we’re all disasters but it’s okay” kind of way. But the jokes mostly land like the polite chuckles you hear at a gallery opening after someone misquotes Rothko. There’s a running gag about Sandler’s character not being able to park his car correctly. Hilarious. There’s another about Harold refusing to let his son donate his art to a university. Groundbreaking. It’s all very New Yorker cartoon energy without the punchline.
Visually, the film is as beige as its characters’ emotional range. There are long tracking shots of brownstones, university hallways, and warmly lit apartments that look like they were decorated by someone who read Dwell magazine during a midlife crisis. It’s not that the film looks bad—it’s that it looks like every other Baumbach film. It’s like watching a broken record wear a scarf.
The score, by Randy Newman, occasionally shows up to remind you that this is, in fact, a movie. A whimsical piano twinkle here, a soft string flourish there—none of it memorable, all of it basically holding the film’s hand as it limps toward some kind of emotional climax. And then it doesn’t deliver one. Instead, we get a scene where Sandler and Stiller awkwardly hug, some passive forgiveness is mumbled, and everyone walks away a little older, a little sadder, and still weirdly obsessed with abstract sculpture.
To be fair, the acting is strong. Sandler gives a genuinely good performance, full of restrained pain and simmering anger. Stiller nails the smug, desperate older brother role. Hoffman is entirely believable as a man who thinks every holiday dinner is a retrospective of his life’s work. But great acting doesn’t fix a script that feels like a therapy workbook Baumbach filled out in crayon.
Ultimately, The Meyerowitz Stories is a film that’s desperate to mean something. It wants to explore legacy, failure, and the way family shapes us—but it’s so busy being clever that it forgets to be honest. It’s not heartfelt. It’s heart-adjacent. It’s like watching people cry through a glass wall: you see it, you recognize it, but you never actually feel it.
Final verdict? The Meyerowitz Stories is a family drama with the emotional resonance of a high-end Yelp review. It’s beautifully acted, well-written in the technical sense, and completely allergic to catharsis. Watch it if you’ve ever been in a fight about a trust fund, or if you just enjoy people yelling about sculpture. Otherwise, call your actual father. At least that conversation will be shorter.