Meet the Parents
Meet the Parents is a 2000 American romantic comedy film written by Jim Herzfeld and John Hamburg and directed by Jay Roach. It stars Ben Stiller as Greg Focker, a nurse who suffers a series of unfortunate events while visiting his girlfriend Pam's parents. Teri Polo stars as Greg's girlfriend, and Owen Wilson stars as Pam's ex-boyfriend.
The film is a remake of the 1992 film Meet the Parents directed by Greg Glienna and produced by Jim Vincent. Glienna—who also played the original film's protagonist—and Mary Ruth Clarke wrote the screenplay. Universal Pictures purchased the rights to Glienna's film with the intent of creating a new version. Jim Herzfeld expanded the original script but development was halted for some time. Roach read the expanded script and expressed his desire to direct it. At that time, Steven Spielberg was interested in directing while Jim Carrey was interested in playing the lead role. The studio offered the film to Roach only after Spielberg and Carrey left the project.
Released in the United States and Canada on October 6, 2000, and distributed by Universal Pictures and DreamWorks Pictures internationally through United International Pictures, the film earned back its initial budget of $55 million in only 11 days. It became one of the highest-grossing films of 2000, earning more than $165 million in North America and more than $330 million worldwide. It was well received by film critics and viewers alike, winning several awards and earning additional nominations. Ben Stiller won two comedy awards for his performance, and the film was chosen as the Favorite Comedy Motion Picture at the 2001 People's Choice Awards. It was followed by the sequels Meet the Fockers and Little Fockers. A fourth film in the franchise titled Focker In-Law is in production and set for release in Thanksgiving 2026.
Plot
Gaylord "Greg" Focker, a Jewish-American nurse living in Chicago, intends to propose to his girlfriend of ten months, second-grade teacher Pam Byrnes. He chooses to get her father's blessing at her sister Debbie's wedding at their parents' house on Long Island, and plans to propose to her in front of her family. This plan is put on hold when the airline loses his luggage, which contains the engagement ring after airport security refused to let him take it through the x-ray machine and making him check it in.At the Byrneses' house, Greg meets Pam's father Jack, mother Dina, and beloved cat Mr. Jinx. Despite displaying a friendly demeanor toward Greg, Jack is immediately suspicious of him and is critical of his choice of career as a nurse. Greg gifts Jack an extremely rare flower, but Jack does not recognize it, although he claims to be a retired florist.
Greg becomes more uncomfortable after he receives an impromptu lie detector test from Jack. Pam explains that Jack's profession as a florist is a cover, and that he is actually a retired CIA operative who interrogated double agents.
Meeting the rest of Pam's family and friends, including Debbie's future in-laws, Greg becomes insecure about his relationship with the former when he learns that she was previously engaged. Her ex-fiancé Kevin is amiable, handsome, wealthy, and still on friendly terms with her and her family. He is also the best man in Debbie's wedding.
Despite efforts to impress Pam's family, Greg's inadvertent actions make him an easy target for ridicule. He accidentally injures Debbie during a pool volleyball game, floods the backyard with sewage by flushing a broken toilet, breaks an urn containing the ashes of Jack's mother that Mr. Jinx uses as kitty litter, and loses a cigarette while chasing Mr. Jinx on the roof, inadvertently setting on fire the wedding altar that Kevin built. Jack also suspects that Greg is a marijuana user after he endorses the marijuana interpretation of "Puff, the Magic Dragon". Jack's suspicion increases when he catches Pam's brother Denny retrieving a marijuana pipe from a jacket that he lent to Greg, which Denny hastily lies about being Greg's.
After losing Mr. Jinx, Greg temporarily replaces him with a nearly identical stray whose tail he has spray-painted, while buying time to find the real cat. While the family are at the engagement party, the imposter cat makes a mess of the house, including destroying Debbie's wedding dress. Greg's deception is exposed when a neighbor finds the real Mr. Jinx and Jack confronts Greg, so the entire Byrnes family demands that he leave Long Island.
Jack accuses Greg of lying about taking the Medical College Admission Test because his CIA contacts could not find any record of a Gregory Focker. Greg retaliates by revealing that he has seen Jack engaging in secret meetings, receiving passports and speaking in Thai. He deduces that Jack has taken on a new CIA mission, but Jack angrily reveals that he was arranging a surprise honeymoon in Thailand for Debbie and her fiancé Bob.
A devastated Greg drives to the airport to return to Chicago, but he is detained by airport security for refusing to check his suitcase, which is too large to be a carry-on, and taking out his anger on a flight attendant while shouting "Bomb" on the plane after she told him that it wouldn't fit in the overhead bin.
At the Byrneses' house, Pam shows her parents copies of Greg's MCAT transcript, which his parents faxed to her. As well, the CIA found no record of Greg because his legal name is Gaylord, not Gregory. Jack still believes that Greg is an unsuitable husband for Pam, but Dina lectures him about his consistent disapproval of any man whom Pam brings home. After hearing Pam make a heartfelt phone call to Greg, apologizing for not sticking up for him, Jack realizes that she truly loves him.
Jack rushes to the airport and convinces security to release Greg. The two make peace with each other, and Greg admits his fear of not living up to Jack's unattainable standards. After ensuring Greg's loyalty and devotion to Pam, Jack finally accepts him and asks him to be his son-in-law.
After returning to the Byrneses' home, Greg proposes to Pam while Jack and Dina listen from their bedroom, agreeing that they should now meet his parents. After Debbie's wedding, Jack views footage of Greg recorded by hidden cameras that he had placed around the house, but when Greg finds one of the cameras, he vents his frustrations with Jack.
Cast
Themes
Greg Focker is a middle-class Jewish nurse whose social and cultural position is juxtaposed against the Byrnes family of upper-middle class White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. With respect to Greg as a Jew and a nurse when compared to the Byrnes and Banks families, a distinct cultural gap is created and subsequently widened. The cultural differences are often highlighted, and Greg repeatedly made aware of them. This serves to achieve comedic effect through character development, and has also been commented on as being indicative of thematic portrayal of Jewish characters' roles in modern film, as well as being a prime example of how male nurses are portrayed in media. Speaking about character development in Meet the Parents, director Jay Roach stated that he wanted an opportunity to "do character-driven comedy" and "to create realistic characters, but heighten the comedic situations and predicaments".Vincent Brook of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television observes mainstream Hollywood cinema's tendency since the 1990s of incorporating Jewish liminality and "popularizing the Jew". He explains the "manly Jewish triumph" of characters like Jeff Goldblum's David Levinson in Independence Day and labels it as a "certain answer to America's yearnings for a new Jewish hero". This stands in direct contrast to the schlemiel or "the Jewish fool", which was seen to have been revitalized in the mid-1990s after faltering since the 1960s. The schlemiel, Brook explains, is an anti-hero in whose humiliation the audience finds supreme pleasure. Within that context, Brook describes Greg Focker's character as "the quintessential example of the postmodern schlemiel". The repeated embarrassing encounters that Greg faces with his girlfriend's all-American family is compared to the example of Jason Biggs's character Jim Levenstein of the American Pie film series, in which Levenstein is often the comedic centerpiece due to his repeated sexual embarrassments.
Anne Bower wrote about Jewish characters at mealtime as part of the broader movement that she believed started in the 1960s, when filmmakers started producing work that explores the "Jewish self-definition". She postulated that the dinner table becomes an arena where Jewish characters are often and most pointedly put into "conflicts with their ethnic and sexual selves". She described the example of Greg sitting down for dinner with the Byrnes family and being asked to bless the food. In this scene, Greg attempts to recite a prayer by improvising and, in doing so, launches into a recital of the song "Day by Day" from Act I of Godspell. Bower noted this scene as "particularly important for establishing the cultural distance" between the Jewish Greg and the Christian Byrneses. She noted that the social gap is further widened the next morning when Greg is the last person to arrive at the breakfast table; he shows up wearing pajamas while everyone else is fully clothed. Here, Greg is shown eating a bagel, which Bower argued as being a clear signifier of Jewishness.
Based on common misconceptions and stereotypes about men in nursing, Greg's profession is repeatedly brought up by Jack in a negative context, and the character of Greg Focker has come to be one of the best known film portrayals of a male nurse. Although men dominated the profession in earlier times, there has been a feminization of the nursing profession over the course of the last century that has often caused men in nursing to be portrayed as misfits by the media. A common stereotype is that of a man who accepts a career in nursing as an unfortunate secondary career choice, either failing to become a physician or still trying to become one. Such stereotyping is due to a presumption that a man would prefer to be a physician but is unable to become one due to lack of intelligence or non-masculine attributes. Jack is often seen openly criticizing Greg's career choice per his perception of nursing being an effeminate profession. In their book Men in Nursing: History, Challenges, and Opportunities, authors Chad O'Lynn and Russell Tranbarger present this as an example of a negative portrayal. Commenting on the same issue but disagreeing, Barbara Cherry, in her book Contemporary Nursing: Issues, Trends, & Management, called the portrayal of Greg as a nurse "one of the most positive film portrayals of men who are nurses", and commented that Greg "humorously addresses and rises above the worst of all stereotypes that are endured by men in this profession". Sandy and Harry Summers, in the book Saving Lives: Why the Media's Portrayal of Nurses Puts Us All at Risk, postulate that Greg's character, although intelligent and firm in his defense of his profession, "might have done more to rebut the stereotypes", and also report that "some men in nursing" expressed their opinions that it would have been better not to present the stereotypes at all.