James Rebhorn Meet the Parents (2000)
James Rebhorn was fifty-two when Meet the Parents opened, with twenty years of working-actor credits in studio film and prestige television. The Larry Banks role — Kevin's father, the patrician surgeon hosting the destroyed wedding — sat squarely inside the Rebhorn specialty: the figure of cold institutional authority whose decency is conditional on procedure being followed.
Rebhorn built a career on procedural-authority parts
Rebhorn's filmography by 2000 included Scent of a Woman (1992, the headmaster), My Cousin Vinny (1992), Independence Day (1996, the Secretary of Defense), The Game (1997, the brother's banker), Snow Falling on Cedars (1999), and recurring television roles on Seinfeld (the prosecutor in the finale), Third Watch, and Law & Order. The recurring casting type was specific: middle-aged white men in suits whose authority was institutional and whose warmth was professional rather than personal.
"I tend to play the people who have to deliver bad news. Lawyers, doctors, headmasters, secretaries of defense. I think it's the face. I have a face that the camera reads as 'this man is about to ruin your day.'" — James Rebhorn, The New York Times (obituary, 2014)
What Larry Banks does in the film
The Banks household is the film's structural counter-weight to the Byrnes household. Both are upscale Long Island families. Both expect their sons-in-law to perform to standard. The difference is that the Banks standard is WASP procedural — the surgeon father, the polite mother, the earnest groom — and the Byrnes standard is operational. Rebhorn's job is to give the Banks household its visible institutional gravity, the family that the Byrnes family is performing alongside throughout the wedding-week sequence.
Larry's specific function lands at the engagement party at Kevin's house. When Greg's painted cat is unmasked and Jack publicly ejects Greg from the circle of trust, the Banks family is the audience that watches it happen — the procedural family registering that the operational family has just done what operational families do. Rebhorn plays it with a single look. The wedding has been moved twice already (septic flood at the Byrneses', altar fire at the Banks's); a third destruction is about to occur. The Banks family is too polite to comment.
Rebhorn's later work and Brody
After Meet the Parents Rebhorn's most enduring late-career role was Frank Mathison, Carrie Mathison's father, on Showtime's Homeland (2011–2014). Frank is another procedural-authority figure — a former diplomat, calmly managing his daughter's bipolar disorder — and the role gave Rebhorn a sustained dramatic platform in his last years. He died in March 2014 of melanoma. He had written his own obituary, including a closing line that circulated widely after his death.
"He died on March 21, 2014, at his home in South Orange, NJ, of melanoma cancer. He is survived by his wife, Rebecca Linn, and his two daughters, Emma and Hannah... He was thinking about us when he wrote this. We will think about him forever." — James Rebhorn, self-written obituary published March 2014
What Rebhorn brought to the comic ecosystem
Rebhorn's value in Meet the Parents is the ecosystem he completes. The film's comedy depends on the Byrnes household being read as eccentric against a recognizable patrician norm; without the Banks family providing that norm, the surveillance frame at the Byrneses would read as merely strange rather than as actively transgressing the social standard the wedding has assembled around. Rebhorn's casting is the production's quiet bet that the audience will recognize the Banks-family register on sight, and laugh because they recognize it.