Meet the Parents (2000) Meet the Parents (2000)

See also: _Index | Plot Structure (Meet the Parents) | Backbeats (Meet the Parents)

Quick Facts

  • Director: Jay Roach
  • Screenplay: Jim Herzfeld and John Hamburg (story by Greg Glienna and Mary Ruth Clarke, based on Glienna's 1992 short film)
  • Starring: Ben Stiller (Greg "Gaylord" Focker, male nurse), Robert De Niro (Jack Byrnes, retired CIA), Teri Polo (Pam Byrnes), Blythe Danner (Dina Byrnes), Nicole DeHuff (Debbie Byrnes), Owen Wilson (Kevin Rawley, Pam's wealthy ex-fiancé), James Rebhorn (Dr. Larry Banks, Kevin's father), Jon Abrahams (Denny Byrnes), Thomas McCarthy (Bob Banks)
  • Cinematography: Peter James
  • Editor: Jon Poll
  • Music: Randy Newman
  • Runtime: 108 minutes
  • Budget: approximately $55 million
  • Worldwide Box Office: approximately $330.4 million
  • Release Date: October 6, 2000 (US)
  • MPAA Rating: PG-13
  • Distributor: Universal Pictures and DreamWorks Pictures

Overview

A Chicago male nurse with the surname Focker travels to Oyster Bay, Long Island for a long weekend with his girlfriend's family, intending to ask her father — a tightly wound retired CIA operative who runs the household as a low-grade counterintelligence operation — for permission to propose. Over seventy-two hours the visit converts every well-meant gesture into evidence: the lost luggage forces Greg into Pam's brother's clothes, the "circle of trust" speech codifies the surveillance, the cat Jinx becomes a witness, the polygraph turns the spare room into an interrogation booth, and a champagne cork, a backyard volleyball game, an overflowing septic tank, a chimney fire, and an accidentally-painted Himalayan all stack up into a record Jack reads as a profile rather than a stretch of bad luck. The comedy is Jack's investigative apparatus pointed at a son-in-law candidate who has nothing to hide and is destroyed precisely by trying to perform innocence. Released two months after the 2000 election and a year before 9/11, the film became the year's surprise hit and seeded the franchise (Meet the Fockers, 2004; Little Fockers, 2010) and, more durably, the phrase "circle of trust" as American shorthand for paranoid in-group surveillance dressed up as intimacy.