#meyerowitz stories

♡•Jean Meyerowitz•♡

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Dustin Hoffman, who turns 83 today was a different kind of movie star – short, average looking with a nasal voice, but who could play anybody. A few films from his long, great career.

Enrico Salvatore “Ratso” Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy D: John Schlesinger (1969). As a crippled, lowlife con man (with a NY accent that could scrape paint ) who becomes a pimp to a Texas hustler, Hoffman brings both humor (“I’M WALKIN HERE!”) and pathos to a street bum you’d go out of your way to avoid eye contact with. And the chemistry he develops with John Voight cuts through the satirical busyness of Schlesinger’s view of New York. The grating little loser gives the movie its heart.

Michael Dorsey/Dorothy Michaels in Tootsie. D: Sydney Pollack (1982). This gender-bending screwball comedy was built around Hoffman who plays an actor whose obnoxious perfectionism has burned bridges he hasn’t even crossed yet. He revives his wrecked career by dressing in drag and getting a job at a soap opera and complicates his love life by falling for a “fellow” actress (Jessica Lange) whose father (Charles Durning) falls for HIM. Throw in great work by Teri Garr, Bill Murray, Dabney Coleman and Pollack himself (as Dorsey’s agent) for an instant comedy classic. And the gender-bending extends to the audience; we also like Hoffman better as a woman. 

Noah Baumbach Explores Love, Resentment And Anger In 'The Meyerowitz Stories'

Baumbach's new film mixes comedy with deep emotional pain. It revolves around three adult siblings whose father is a self-absorbed sculptor. Baumbach's previous films include The Squid and the Whale.

TERRY GROSS: So since this movie is so much about the children of divorce and of half-siblings from two separate marriages, when your parents divorced, did they marry other people and have children with those other spouses?

NOAH BAUMBACH: They didn't have children, but they both married again.

GROSS: I'm wondering if your parents became different people when they were no longer a couple 'cause I think most people change depending on who they're with. I think most people have, you know, like...

BAUMBACH: Yeah.

GROSS:  I think most people have some kind of personality code-switching in addition to maybe language code-switching where you're funny with one person and you're more serious with another and... You talk more with one person and less with another person. You know, you're more quiet and introverted with one person than another. So, did your parents change when they became couples with different people, and did you change when you became part of those different units?

BAUMBACH: Yeah, I'm sure they did. And I mean, I observed it, and I'm sure they did in ways that at that time I didn't even see. I mean, I remember, like, the first Christmas after they separated and both of them got these big, bushy trees. And we'd always had these really bony trees. And I remember thinking, like, why didn't we do this when we all lived together? Why now do we have the good tree, which is maybe a symbolic version of what you're saying, you know?

31DaysofAdamDriver

Day 14: Favorite Minor Role