Plot
Gaylord Myron "Greg" Focker (Ben Stiller) and his fiancée Pam Byrnes (Polo) decide to introduce their parents to each other. They first fly to Oyster Bay, Long Island, to pick up Pam's father, retired CIA operative Jack Byrnes (De Niro), her mother Dina (Danner) and one-year-old nephew Little Jack. But rather than going to the airport as planned, Jack decides to drive the family to Miami to meet the Fockers in his new RV.
Once they arrive, they are greeted by Greg's eccentric but fun-loving and amiable father, Bernie (Hoffman), and mother, Roz (Streisand), who is a sex therapist for elder couples. Worried that Jack may be put off by the Fockers' lifestyle, Greg convinces Roz to pretend that she is a yoga instructor for the weekend. Though Jack and Bernie get off to a good start, small cracks begin to form between Jack and the Fockers, due to their contrasting personalities. Things are made worse when a chase between the Fockers' dog, Moses, and the Byrns' cat, Jinx, culminates with Jinx flushing Moses down the RV's toilet, forcing Bernie to destroy it to save Moses, and later on when Bernie accidentally injures Jack's back during a game of football.
Pam, meanwhile, informs Greg that she is pregnant, but the two decide to keep it a secret from Jack, who does not know they are having sex. Jack, however, becomes suspicious of Greg's character again when they are introduced to the Focker's housekeeper, Isabel Villalobos (Alanna Ubach), with whom Bernie reveals Greg had a sexual affair fifteen years before. Jack later takes the RV to Isabel's fifteen-year-old son, Jorge (Ray Santiago), to fix the toilet, but is disturbed by Jorge's striking resemblance to Greg and begins to suspect he may be Greg's son with Isabel. Meanwhile, Roz, Bernie and Dina realize Pam is pregnant, but promise not to tell Jack. Growing envious of Bernie and Roz's active sex life, Dina consults Roz on sex tips in order to seduce Jack, but none of them work.
Things eventually come to a crunch when Greg is left alone to babysit Little Jack, whom Jack has been raising via the Ferber method. Despite Jack's instructions to leave Little Jack to self-soothe, Greg cannot bear to listen to Little Jack's cries and tends to the boy to cheer him up, turning the television on, acting funny and inadvertently teaching Little Jack to say "asshole". A brief phone call from Roz is long enough for Little Jack to wander out of his pen (after Jinx opens it by accident), put on Scarface and glue his hands to a rum bottle. After a furious argument with the Fockers and his own family (though amends are quickly made), Jack reverts to his old ways and sends Greg and Jorge's hair samples for a DNA test, while inviting Jorge to the Focker's planned engagement party in hopes of getting Greg to admit he is Jorge's father.
At the engagement party, Jack introduces Greg to Jorge, and later when Greg refuses to admit Jorge is his son, Jack injects him with a truth serum to make him talk. On stage, Greg blurts out that Pam is pregnant and that Jorge is indeed his son (in a comically Darth Vader-esque manner) before finally passing out. When the others realize Jack's actions the next day, another argument ensues and Dina admits that they all knew Pam was pregnant and deliberately did not tell him. Shocked and hurt by this, Jack leaves with his grandson. Bernie and Greg give pursuit, but are arrested by a policeman, LeFlore (Tim Blake Nelson), for speeding. Jack returns to defend them after being informed Greg is not Jorge's father (his real father turns out to be a baseball player who also resembles Greg), but the overeager LeFlore arrests him as well. In their cell, Greg, Jack and Bernie make up and are released by the local judge, Ira (Shelley Berman), who is a student of Roz and close friend of the Focker family.
Greg and Pam are married that weekend by Pam's ex-fiancée (Owen Wilson). During the party, Jack asks Roz for some sex tips and sneaks into the RV with Dina.
During the credits, Jack watches hidden baby-cam footage of the Fockers giving attention to Little Jack over Jack's previous objections: Roz gives Little Jack chocolate, Bernie advises him to use his crying to disagree with everything Jack says, and Greg pretends to drunkenly tell Little Jack to keep it a secret that he left to smoke pot, not answer the phone, when he left Little Jack unattended which resulted in Jack gluing his hands to a rum bottle and that Pam is not really pregnant and only said it so that Jack would let them get married. Greg then pretends to only just discover the camera but then after making mocking gestures at it, you realize that Greg knew about it all along and none of the things he said before were true.
Read more about this topic: Meet The Fockers
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)