Meet the Parents

Jay Roach’s 2000 comedy sends Greg Focker, a male nurse, into a weekend with his girlfriend’s family, where the father he must win over is a former intelligence officer. The engine is that the lies never reset: the lost luggage, the burning chuppah and the spray-painted stray cat keep raising the cost of the one before. The film withholds his right to shout back almost to the end, then collects at the airport, where refusing to check a bag and saying the word bomb gets him removed. The polygraph scene is the centre of that pressure, more interrogation than comedy. The big set pieces were scripted: spilled ashes, a fire, a volleyball to the face. The polygraph was not. Robert De Niro brought the idea, and Roach says details like the unfolding of the glasses grew on the day. Jim Carrey coined the Focker surname before leaving the project, and the studio gave the ratings board a list of real people with it. It remakes a 1992 independent picture that ended far darker, which Universal still will not let its director, Greg Glienna, release. A good fit if you want humiliation stacked in steps, the release held to the end. Not for anyone who cannot sit through a character pinned as long as the polygraph pins Greg.