In this comedy from Austin Powers director Jay Roach , Ben Stiller plays a young man who endures a disastrous weekend at the home of his girlfriend's parents. Greg Focker ( Stiller ) is completely in love with Pam Byrnes ( Teri Polo ), and views their upcoming trip to her parents' house on Long Island (where her sister is to be married during the weekend) as a perfect opportunity to ask her to marry him. Once Greg is introduced to Pam's parents, however, things stampede steadily downhill. Pam's father Jack ( Robert De Niro ) takes an instant and obvious dislike to his daughter's boyfriend, lambasting him for his job as a nurse and generally making Greg painfully aware of the differences between him and Pam's family. Where Greg is grubby, relatively unambitious, and Jewish, Pam comes from a long line of well-mannered, blue-blooded WASPs. Things go from bad to worse in less time than it takes to spin a dreidel, with Greg incurring the wrath of both Pam's father — who, it turns out, worked for the CIA for 34 years — and the rest of her family, and almost single-handedly destroying their house and the wedding in the process. — Rebecca Flint