A highly literary film with a few truly great scenes: Meyerowitz Stories

Noah Baumbach's 2017 The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) makes not effort to hide or smother its literary ambitions, evident from the title of course, obvious to those who know that NB himself is the son of a somewhat avant-garde writer who struggled for recognition, never quite attaining the first rank, and from the tone it establishes right away: a series of set pieces, stories if you will, that seem very scripted and literary, but in a good sense for the most part: These are scripted, literary people, players in the New York academic and intelligentsia and the arts community. It's a little hard to warm up to this film at first, as Danny Meyerowitz (Adam Sandler, who is great in this role) is such a sad sack and so domineered by his father, played by Dustin Hoffman, Harold M, an officious, self-important sculptor retired from a teaching gig a Bard and living very well w/ 4th wife in Manhattan and obsessively worried about his reputation. The film brightens considerably when Ben Stiller, playing youngest son, a successful investment counselor living in LA, shows up to deal w/ various family issues. Though the ending feels loose and out of control - as if made up of snippets that didn't fit elsewhere - there are a couple of great scenes that make the film totally worth watching - in particular the two half-brothers getting into it w/ each other, the toasts at the "show" featuring one of Harold's sculptures (by this point it's obvious that Harold was an overblown hack, but it gets even worse), and Danny's final confrontation with the frail, weakened Harold. There have been a ton of films about dysfunctional, highly educated and creative families, but Baumbach has created his own little postage stamp of urbane backbiting and misery, with just a touch of lightening humor and humanity (esp if you can buy the closing image), and this film is almost like a culmination of his work to date.