Adam Sandler shines in Netflix’s The Meyerowitz Stories, a quintessential Noah Baumbach comedy

Noah Baumbach may be American cinema’s greatest chronicler of family dysfunction — and his newest film, The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), may be one of his finest entries in the genre.

While Baumbach’s excellent recent movies (like 2012’s Frances Ha, 2014’s While We’re Young, and 2015’s Mistress America) are gentle comedies about youth and inexperience, The Meyerowitz Stories returns, for the most part, to familiar topics from the director’s earlier, darker comedies. Like 2005’s The Squid and the Whale and 2007’s Margot at the Wedding, this latest work concerns messed-up cosmopolitan children and their messed-up cosmopolitan parents; intellectual egotists who are lovable in spite of themselves; the fear of never really amounting to anything.

The Meyerowitz Stories garnered early buzz when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival this summer, not just because it’s from Baumbach, but because it was one of two films involved in an ongoing controversy involving Netflix at this year’s festival.

Cannes screenings of The Meyerowitz Stories thus earned the requisite boos when the Netflix logo appeared onscreen, but the film itself received a warm reception from critics and audiences. By my lights, Baumbach has been on a winning streak for years now (I even liked 2010’s Greenberg, though I may be in the minority there). His trademark as a filmmaker is a tight, stylized script delivered by actors whom he directs so well that the dialogue feels natural, which keeps him out of the sometimes overly mannered territory of a screenwriter like Aaron Sorkin.

The Meyerowitz Stories is set up as a series of chapters about its title family, led by patriarch Harold (Dustin Hoffman). Harold was a professor at Bard and a moderately successful sculptor in his time, but these days he’s forced to watch his old friends, like L.J. Shapiro (Judd Hirsch), get retrospectives at the MoMA while he languishes in relative obscurity. (The course of being an abstract sculptor never did run smooth.)

The film boasts an all-around knockout cast, but its most notable — and maybe surprising — performance comes from Adam Sandler, who carries the proceedings as Danny, Harold’s oldest and least professionally successful spawn. We rarely get to see Sandler do this kind of straight-faced comedy, and he’s so good in The Meyerowitz Stories that he deserves the chance to do more.

Danny has clearly been an excellent father to Eliza (the luminous Grace Van Patten), an affectionate and bright budding filmmaker who’s heading to Bard to pursue her interests. But being a great father is obviously not an accomplishment that ranks high among the Meyerowitz family.

Harold, for his part, has been married four times — to the mother of Danny and Jean (Elizabeth Marvel), as well as the mother of their half-brother Matthew (Ben Stiller), who’s been very successful as a financial manager for famous people (one of them played in a brief but welcome appearance by Adam Driver). There’s also a shadowy annulment somewhere in the mix. His current marriage is to the frizzy-headed and free-spirited Maureen (Emma Thompson), who seems nice enough but lets her alcoholism get the better of her, and as a self-styled gourmet cook serves up truly terrible meals to her husband’s children and grandchildren.

Most of the film’s chapters are about Danny and Matthew, but there are occasional spotlights on other family members as well. These spotlights are the “new” stories of The Meyerowitz Stories’ “new and selected” subtitle. Meanwhile, the “selected” stories are threaded throughout the film, as Harold begins to require medical attention and his kids have to sort out some long-repressed issues in their relationships with each other and their father. Every family has excuses and statements and tales that they recount whenever they’re together; Harold’s illness gives ample opportunity for the Meyerowitz clan’s collection of such excuses and statements and tales to bubble back up to the surface.

The result is a funny, tender comedy — but tender in the way that the bruise on your hip is tender when you keep slamming it against something. This is not a movie about a family who settles their differences and learns to live with one another in peaceful harmony.

And thank goodness for that. These characters are so familiar, and so real, that a neatly wrapped-up conclusion would ring patently false. Instead, The Meyerowitz Stories is a tale of a family, like all of our families, that still hasn’t quite figured out how to somehow live with each other’s deficiencies. But at least they’re trying.

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) opens in limited US theaters and on Netflix on October 13.