Soundtracking: The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)

by Chris Feil

Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) is filled with pain for each of its characters, that's undercut by melodic and melancholic humor throughout. Each of the Meyerowitz children have been by psychologically modled by their artist father Harold (Dustin Hoffman) as if they were one of his sculptures, and share a congruent sadness. It’s one of Baumbach’s most underrated and bruised emotional efforts, its balance of pain and levity captured in a few delicate musical moments. Throughout, Baumbach builds a family history that is vivid and always at the surface, with the music allowing us to see the evolution of their sadness...

Though the Meyerowitz’s reveal their stuck-in-the-past mentality through their music choices (Lisa Lisa crops up in the very first scene as the sing-a-long bop that it is), it’s Randy Newman’s farcically nostalgic piano score that threads them all together as one unit. His “Old Man” closes the film, his voice emerging after Harold has died and his granddaughter Eliza finds his lost work, as if the family is finally able to speak a buried thought. It’s a closing credits song that feels like a sad exhale, the forgiveness that had been difficult to grant to a self-involved father.

Eliza is significant in showing the chain of familial angst. Her father Danny (Adam Sandler) has recently split with her mother, his passivity factoring into his adult failings including his marriage. Together, Danny and Eliza sing “Genius Girl” at the Meyerowitz piano, a song he’d once written in the happier days of her youth. You feel the years in their duet, the sunnier feeling it used to have sanded away by years of life’s complications and disappointments. The affection hasn’t faded, but the carefree nature of the song’s melody has.

Another element that gives this number a sense of history is the actor that sings them. Modern audiences might forget, but comedic parlor songs were part of Sandler’s original schtick. From “The Hanukah Song” to SNL bits like Opera Man, we were once used to seeing him in a musically whimsical mode. But like his Danny Meyerowitz, who has long since given up on his creative dreams, creating music is no longer a part of Sandler’s identity. It’s another layer to the performance of the song that makes it feel rooted in a less burdened past.

Sandler’s signature unpretentiously catchy and simplistic sound also captures the Meyerowitz family lore with “Myron/Byron”. The song references an offhand moment in which the elder Harold Meyerowitz simply mistook someone’s name, but Danny musicalizing it turned it into significant family legend. Danny first stumbles into the song as you would a memory, with Harold joining in. Later, we see all of the Meyerowitz children singing it together in a rare moment of sibling unity. Here the song becomes a symbol of the Meyerowitz’s (and our own) ability to find and create happier silver linings out of a painfully divided and divisive home.

All Soundtracking installments can be found here!

Comments

[Suzanne]

This movie is so underrated.