MISCELLANEOUS
Ben Stiller
The New Yorker
The tireless Ben Stiller is like a kid acting in a show at summer camp, cutting up for his relatives and friends. This boy-man wants the camera. Once he gets its attention, he hesitates and stumbles, playing out for us the eternal war between his ambitions and his good-guy restraints. In his male-ingénue roles (including the hapless Greg Focker in the current smash hit “Meet the Fockers,” a sequel to “Meet the Parents”), lust and the danger of humiliation tangle him up. His eyes may suggest outrage, but his character is that of a sweet, caring, rather simple-natured fellow who, like some baffled knight, has to undergo the most awful trials as he pursues his goal-a tall, slender blonde. In “There’s Something About Mary” (1998), his first chasing-the-blonde movie, he’s so jittery he catches his genitals in a zipper, and, later in the picture, a little dog attacks his crotch. Robert De Niro keeps bursting in on Stiller and his girl in “Meet the Parents” as they are about to make love, and, in the sequel, it’s only Stiller’s parents, the older Fockers-Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand, as tanned love babies-who make out. Stiller has bulges he can’t do anything with. He’s a walking mass of libido, and frustration is his lot.
A contender in so many of his roles, Stiller is the latest, and crudest, version of the urban Jewish male on the make. (Richard Dreyfuss and Woody Allen, in vastly different ways, were earlier versions.) But there’s anxiety in Stiller’s acting as well as in his characters, and that may be the source of his puppyish overeagerness. Stiller is not a natural comic. He’s not effortlessly funny, like Bill Murray, Richard Pryor, the young Eddie Murphy, or Jim Carrey; he’s not an irrepressible, heartless clown, like the devil-eyed Jack Black, or enjoyably sleazy, like Owen Wilson, who, working frequently with Stiller, has developed a feckless stoner bewilderment that plays off nicely against Stiller’s clenched overdrive. This man pushes harder than anyone else. You may resist so naked a demand, but you may also think, Why fight him? If he wants approval that much, let him have it. In any case, you don’t have much choice, since he’s in half of the new comedies-six movies last year alone-and in some dramatic films, too. (Since the late eighties, Stiller has appeared in more than thirty movies, directed three, and produced four.) In recent months, Web sites have begged him to take it easy, to take a break. But I wouldn’t count on it. Ben Stiller, amazingly, has become a major movie star. He’s never done much for me, but he makes a connection with millions of people, and actors with a string of hits rarely go off on retreats.
The son of the farceurs Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, Stiller, now thirty-nine, started performing when he was a child-appearing on “The Mike Douglas Show” and then in a short-lived dramatic TV series starring his mother. After a year at U.C.L.A., he did a brief stint on “Saturday Night Live,” and then, in 1990, built his own variety show on MTV. He says he grew up watching “S.N.L.” and “SCTV,” and sketch humor is still one of his mainstays (he does a wicked Tom Cruise). In sketch humor, obviousness is not just a virtue, it’s a necessity-hit it right at the beginning, hit it hard and loud, repeat it, and then get off. But this sort of thing notoriously does not work in movies. Bill Murray and Steve Martin developed dissonant shadings and ironic and reflective moods that helped sustain full-length movie performances, but “S.N.L.” and “SCTV” graduates like Dan Aykroyd, Martin Short, and Eugene Levy, despite abundant talent and considerable opportunity, did not develop in that way, and their screen careers fizzled out. What accounts for Stiller’s enormous success? To put it mildly, he’s not a high-style or a reflective performer. But, in many of his movies, he’s a hetero swain, and that seems to have done it for him.
Granted, he’s an odd-looking suitor. His face seems constructed by someone playing with the separate eyes, noses, and mouths of a children’s mix-and-match book. There’s nothing wrong with the features, but they don’t quite go together. His forehead is high; his eyes sink into caves; his long jaw somehow breaks into a wide, sharklike grin. Stiller knows how to use his big head for broad comic effect: if he pulls down his chin and stares, he looks like a mildly paranoid gibbon, and by furrowing his brow and twisting his mouth he can do a dozen variations on dopey suspiciousness, manic glee, or pawing-the-dirt sexual rage. In roles where he drops the anxious-Jewish-male persona, these contortions tend to take over. As the idiotically vain model Derek Zoolander, in “Zoolander” (2001), Stiller played most of the movie in snakeskin and lamé, with a fey pout reminiscent of Prince at his most libidinously moist. It was a great spoof-for a while. There was a lot of talk in the movie of Zoolander’s achieving a new “look,” but, for the audience, one glimpse of Stiller was enough to get the entire character. The performance never developed much past the opening pose and pout.
Stiller is short and strong-indeed, he was so muscled up as White Goodman, the narcisso-creep owner of a deluxe fitness center, in last year’s “Dodgeball,” that he was almost impossible to look at. The character has a droopy handlebar mustache, speaks in a guttural, doused-in-testosterone voice, and imagines himself a great wit. Again, the spoof was only briefly successful-Stiller’s eager willingness to make a fool of himself (his entire frame was engorged) limited the performance to a stunt. He was the star, but Vince Vaughn, playing a rival gym owner in his careless, don’t-catch-me-trying way, quietly pulled the movie away from him.
If Stiller has enjoyed commercial success with sketch humor in a way that Martin Short, a comic genius, has not, it may be because he’s willing to aim lower. As movies have been marketed more and more in recent years to teen-agers and young males, sophisticated romantic comedy has disappeared, and Stiller’s ascendancy can be seen as part of that loss. In a period of gross-out comedy, he’s a masochistic performer who is still willing, in his late thirties, to play the sap. He’s had some effective moments of mortification-notably the long dinner-table scene in “Meet the Parents,” in which he gets caught in a preposterous lie about milking a cat, and, using his hands to explain, slowly spins out a web of stranger and stranger absurdity. But most of the time he’s scrambling and falling. The young audience that creates the opening-weekend blockbuster hits isn’t going to object to a guy who spazzes out, or to a nutty TV-style spoof that goes nowhere. Many teen-age boys are walking masses of libido, too, and Stiller is their man, while girls seem to find his candidate status charming or touching-for all the wild look of desire in his eyes, he’s hardly a threat. For kids, the fumbling Jewish male may simply function as a universal, adaptable representative of their insecurity about their own lives.
The fact that Stiller is not a natural comic, or a conventionally good-looking actor, may actually work in his favor. The marketers’ sell-to-everybody strategies have, in recent decades, produced a peculiar perversion of cultural democracy in which style, even a high degree of professional finesse, comes off as a kind of insult. Americans today can’t abide even the suspicion that they’re being outclassed, and Stiller doesn’t outclass anyone. Such handsome smart guys as Alec Baldwin and George Clooney bring a touch of cynical awareness to everything they do; they aren’t comics, of course, but it can’t be a coincidence that Baldwin and Clooney haven’t quite become stars. The intellectual bite they bring to their roles may make people uneasy.
Ben Stiller is no doubt aware of all this, and he may, on some level, want to break out of the box that his extraordinary success has put him in. After all, early in his career, as the director of “Reality Bites” (1994), he created a moody portrait of the various funks and insecurities of his generation, and his drives and fears achieved a perfect balance in “Flirting with Disaster,” David O. Russell’s hip satire from 1996. Stiller has, as well, a dark side, which has come out in his direction of the nagging, ineffective Jim Carrey comedy “The Cable Guy” (1996); in his performance as a sexual betrayer in the 1998 Neil LaBute atrocity “Your Friends & Neighbors”; and in “Permanent Midnight” (1998), in which he rather lamely took on the drug-haunted life of his friend the writer Jerry Stahl. Stiller doesn’t have the intellectual heft to create “dark” movies, but, as he gets older, couldn’t he use his edge to give us a romantic comedy that adults could watch with pleasure? And he should relax and stop glaring at the camera like a cornered animal. Dustin Hoffman played an uncomfortable young lover, sixties style, in “The Graduate,” then kept growing as an actor. Now, in “Meet the Fockers,” he’s a joyous, dancing clown, completely at ease in his aging but superb flesh. For an actor about to hit forty, that’s a spiritual victory worth imitating.
Dads The Boston Globe has an interesting feature and photo series on working Dads today. http://www.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/galleries/2005/0116/dads/
Ben Stiller
The New Yorker
The tireless Ben Stiller is like a kid acting in a show at summer camp, cutting up for his relatives and friends. This boy-man wants the camera. Once he gets its attention, he hesitates and stumbles, playing out for us the eternal war between his ambitions and his good-guy restraints. In his male-ingénue roles (including the hapless Greg Focker in the current smash hit “Meet the Fockers,” a sequel to “Meet the Parents”), lust and the danger of humiliation tangle him up. His eyes may suggest outrage, but his character is that of a sweet, caring, rather simple-natured fellow who, like some baffled knight, has to undergo the most awful trials as he pursues his goal-a tall, slender blonde. In “There’s Something About Mary” (1998), his first chasing-the-blonde movie, he’s so jittery he catches his genitals in a zipper, and, later in the picture, a little dog attacks his crotch. Robert De Niro keeps bursting in on Stiller and his girl in “Meet the Parents” as they are about to make love, and, in the sequel, it’s only Stiller’s parents, the older Fockers-Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand, as tanned love babies-who make out. Stiller has bulges he can’t do anything with. He’s a walking mass of libido, and frustration is his lot.
A contender in so many of his roles, Stiller is the latest, and crudest, version of the urban Jewish male on the make. (Richard Dreyfuss and Woody Allen, in vastly different ways, were earlier versions.) But there’s anxiety in Stiller’s acting as well as in his characters, and that may be the source of his puppyish overeagerness. Stiller is not a natural comic. He’s not effortlessly funny, like Bill Murray, Richard Pryor, the young Eddie Murphy, or Jim Carrey; he’s not an irrepressible, heartless clown, like the devil-eyed Jack Black, or enjoyably sleazy, like Owen Wilson, who, working frequently with Stiller, has developed a feckless stoner bewilderment that plays off nicely against Stiller’s clenched overdrive. This man pushes harder than anyone else. You may resist so naked a demand, but you may also think, Why fight him? If he wants approval that much, let him have it. In any case, you don’t have much choice, since he’s in half of the new comedies-six movies last year alone-and in some dramatic films, too. (Since the late eighties, Stiller has appeared in more than thirty movies, directed three, and produced four.) In recent months, Web sites have begged him to take it easy, to take a break. But I wouldn’t count on it. Ben Stiller, amazingly, has become a major movie star. He’s never done much for me, but he makes a connection with millions of people, and actors with a string of hits rarely go off on retreats.
The son of the farceurs Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, Stiller, now thirty-nine, started performing when he was a child-appearing on “The Mike Douglas Show” and then in a short-lived dramatic TV series starring his mother. After a year at U.C.L.A., he did a brief stint on “Saturday Night Live,” and then, in 1990, built his own variety show on MTV. He says he grew up watching “S.N.L.” and “SCTV,” and sketch humor is still one of his mainstays (he does a wicked Tom Cruise). In sketch humor, obviousness is not just a virtue, it’s a necessity-hit it right at the beginning, hit it hard and loud, repeat it, and then get off. But this sort of thing notoriously does not work in movies. Bill Murray and Steve Martin developed dissonant shadings and ironic and reflective moods that helped sustain full-length movie performances, but “S.N.L.” and “SCTV” graduates like Dan Aykroyd, Martin Short, and Eugene Levy, despite abundant talent and considerable opportunity, did not develop in that way, and their screen careers fizzled out. What accounts for Stiller’s enormous success? To put it mildly, he’s not a high-style or a reflective performer. But, in many of his movies, he’s a hetero swain, and that seems to have done it for him.
Granted, he’s an odd-looking suitor. His face seems constructed by someone playing with the separate eyes, noses, and mouths of a children’s mix-and-match book. There’s nothing wrong with the features, but they don’t quite go together. His forehead is high; his eyes sink into caves; his long jaw somehow breaks into a wide, sharklike grin. Stiller knows how to use his big head for broad comic effect: if he pulls down his chin and stares, he looks like a mildly paranoid gibbon, and by furrowing his brow and twisting his mouth he can do a dozen variations on dopey suspiciousness, manic glee, or pawing-the-dirt sexual rage. In roles where he drops the anxious-Jewish-male persona, these contortions tend to take over. As the idiotically vain model Derek Zoolander, in “Zoolander” (2001), Stiller played most of the movie in snakeskin and lamé, with a fey pout reminiscent of Prince at his most libidinously moist. It was a great spoof-for a while. There was a lot of talk in the movie of Zoolander’s achieving a new “look,” but, for the audience, one glimpse of Stiller was enough to get the entire character. The performance never developed much past the opening pose and pout.
Stiller is short and strong-indeed, he was so muscled up as White Goodman, the narcisso-creep owner of a deluxe fitness center, in last year’s “Dodgeball,” that he was almost impossible to look at. The character has a droopy handlebar mustache, speaks in a guttural, doused-in-testosterone voice, and imagines himself a great wit. Again, the spoof was only briefly successful-Stiller’s eager willingness to make a fool of himself (his entire frame was engorged) limited the performance to a stunt. He was the star, but Vince Vaughn, playing a rival gym owner in his careless, don’t-catch-me-trying way, quietly pulled the movie away from him.
If Stiller has enjoyed commercial success with sketch humor in a way that Martin Short, a comic genius, has not, it may be because he’s willing to aim lower. As movies have been marketed more and more in recent years to teen-agers and young males, sophisticated romantic comedy has disappeared, and Stiller’s ascendancy can be seen as part of that loss. In a period of gross-out comedy, he’s a masochistic performer who is still willing, in his late thirties, to play the sap. He’s had some effective moments of mortification-notably the long dinner-table scene in “Meet the Parents,” in which he gets caught in a preposterous lie about milking a cat, and, using his hands to explain, slowly spins out a web of stranger and stranger absurdity. But most of the time he’s scrambling and falling. The young audience that creates the opening-weekend blockbuster hits isn’t going to object to a guy who spazzes out, or to a nutty TV-style spoof that goes nowhere. Many teen-age boys are walking masses of libido, too, and Stiller is their man, while girls seem to find his candidate status charming or touching-for all the wild look of desire in his eyes, he’s hardly a threat. For kids, the fumbling Jewish male may simply function as a universal, adaptable representative of their insecurity about their own lives.
The fact that Stiller is not a natural comic, or a conventionally good-looking actor, may actually work in his favor. The marketers’ sell-to-everybody strategies have, in recent decades, produced a peculiar perversion of cultural democracy in which style, even a high degree of professional finesse, comes off as a kind of insult. Americans today can’t abide even the suspicion that they’re being outclassed, and Stiller doesn’t outclass anyone. Such handsome smart guys as Alec Baldwin and George Clooney bring a touch of cynical awareness to everything they do; they aren’t comics, of course, but it can’t be a coincidence that Baldwin and Clooney haven’t quite become stars. The intellectual bite they bring to their roles may make people uneasy.
Ben Stiller is no doubt aware of all this, and he may, on some level, want to break out of the box that his extraordinary success has put him in. After all, early in his career, as the director of “Reality Bites” (1994), he created a moody portrait of the various funks and insecurities of his generation, and his drives and fears achieved a perfect balance in “Flirting with Disaster,” David O. Russell’s hip satire from 1996. Stiller has, as well, a dark side, which has come out in his direction of the nagging, ineffective Jim Carrey comedy “The Cable Guy” (1996); in his performance as a sexual betrayer in the 1998 Neil LaBute atrocity “Your Friends & Neighbors”; and in “Permanent Midnight” (1998), in which he rather lamely took on the drug-haunted life of his friend the writer Jerry Stahl. Stiller doesn’t have the intellectual heft to create “dark” movies, but, as he gets older, couldn’t he use his edge to give us a romantic comedy that adults could watch with pleasure? And he should relax and stop glaring at the camera like a cornered animal. Dustin Hoffman played an uncomfortable young lover, sixties style, in “The Graduate,” then kept growing as an actor. Now, in “Meet the Fockers,” he’s a joyous, dancing clown, completely at ease in his aging but superb flesh. For an actor about to hit forty, that’s a spiritual victory worth imitating.
Dads The Boston Globe has an interesting feature and photo series on working Dads today. http://www.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/galleries/2005/0116/dads/
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