Meet the Parents, finds comedy in the anxiety-filled experiences of its central character when he meets his girlfriend's demanding parents.

Rating: 7/10 (11 July 2001)

Not having chosen the best time to propose to his beloved Pam (Teri Polo), Greg Focker, a modest and sensible male-nurse with an unfortunate last name, soon discovers that the surest path to pleasing Pam and honoring her family starts by earning the trust of her conservative father. When Pam invites Greg to spend the next few days with her parents in New York, where they will attend her sister's wedding rehearsal, Greg realizes this is the best opportunity to meet the parents and ask for Pam's hand in marriage. Soon after their arrival at the Byrnes' mansion, while trying to dismiss the ill-experience of having lost his suitcase in transit, Greg greets Jack (Robert De Niro) and his wife (Blythe Danner) with optimism. Yet Greg 's efforts to be liked and respected aim in all the wrong directions to either disappoint or offend Jack, a retired horticulturist who lacks a sense of humor and who decides to become Greg's most adverse judge.
Meet the Parents follows Greg Focker along a comical series of misadventures aimed at testing the character's composure as he struggles to disprove his faultfinding father-in-law. Never abandoning its central character's good intentions yet emphasizing its antagonist's unattainable consent, Meet the Parents also creates a few bittersweet moments as it questions the future of the character's plans to wed his increasingly distant girlfriend. Meet the Parents successfully exploits the viewer's familiarity with such stressful situations as proposing, meeting a loved one's parents or planning a wedding, and creates its comedy by pushing to the extreme its subject's numerous embarrassing and compromising positions.