Chameleon Man and Unruly Woman: Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand

Abstract

This essay examines the seminal and transformative functions of Jewish filmic representations of Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand. Taking their unique joint appearances in the Focker series as a pivot point, the essay shows how the breakthroughs in gender modeling and sexuality achieved by the éminences grises of Jewish actors were used, and abused, in Meet the Fockers (2004) and The Little Fockers (2010). Rather than building meaningfully on Hoffman’s and Streisand’s career-long constructions as Chameleon Man extraordinaire and Unruly Woman par excellence, the farcical comedies pour their variegated personas into a generic bottle and their complex intertextual associations into an animation cell. Although their Bernie and Roz Focker characters do predictably succeed in making “menschs” of their uber-WASP in-law counterparts (played by Robert de Niro and Blythe Danner), it’s the Fockers who ultimately get focked, not the other way around.