Jeff, Who Lives at Home is a film about Jeff, who lives at home, and that’s enough subordinate clauses for one day. (Don’t be greedy; you know how fattening they are.) It’s a comedy from the Duplass brothers, Mark and Jay, who have previously made small films that have been well received (The Puffy Chair, Cyrus), and this is their first big film although it’s a small big film, coming in at 83 minutes, which, in its small way, is quite big enough.
It’s a whimsical comedy and, as far as whimsical comedies go, it is quite whimsical, and sometimes comedic, which is fair enough, but ultimately it is slight and repetitive and nothing sticks in the mind. I’m not saying every film has to be laced with meaning or existential despair, or that I am always seeking such things — I am wondrously shallow; ask anyone — but I do think it has to give something beyond an arresting subordinate clause, as delicious as subordinate clauses are.
So, anyway, there’s this Jeff (Jason Segel) and he’s living at home — see how, thinking of your waistline, I rephrased that for you, fatty? — and Jeff lives at home in his mother’s basement, slouching about, watching infomercials and smoking weed. Jeff is 30, unmarried, unemployed, and is either an endearingly foolish mumblecore stoner hero or a total sad sack, depending on which way you come at these things. I veer towards sad sack, but this may only be due to my advanced years and a distaste for weed, which I only tried once and did not like. (My knees went.)
Anyway, his mother, Sharon (Susan Sarandon, who looks better and more radiant at 66 than I have at any age, the bitch), only has the one thing she wants Jeff to do today: buy some wood-glue to fix a slat on the pantry shutters. But nothing is simple for Jeff because Jeff is obsessed with M. Night Shyamalan’s movie Signs, and believes everything in the universe is predetermined, so cannot follow a path until some kind of signal instructs him to do so. Today, the sign is ‘Kevin’, as earlier he had received a ‘wrong number’ call asking for a Kevin, which Jeff perceives as a nod from fate. (‘There are no wrong numbers,’ he insists, ‘only right numbers.’)
Jeff sets off for the store, using the errand as an excuse to find Kevin. This, in turn, leads him to a shaggy-dog style adventure, and to his estranged older brother, Pat (Ed Helms). Pat is in a failing marriage, but is too full of self-regard to know this. He imagines himself a winner and go-getter deserving of a Porsche, which he buys even though he and his wife (Judy Greer) are meant to be saving for a house. (She throws her breakfast all over it.) One brother is too focused, whereas the other is not focused enough. Will they, by the day’s end, have learned something from each other? What do you think?
Look, I have nothing against Segel and Helms, and their particular shtick, but, in the acting stakes, Greer and Sarandon blow them out of the water, or at least perform with some nuance. Sarandon is especially brilliant, saying everything there is to say about her loneliness simply by looking nervously into her compact. She works in a cubicle in some nameless office, and when she starts receiving instant messages from a secret admirer, her body language is enough to tell you she hasn’t had anyone in her life since her husband died 17 years earlier. But her story doesn’t seem part of the story which, in turn, doesn’t seem to go anywhere interesting.
There are some funny scenes — particularly the one where Pat dispatches Jeff to eavesdrop on his wife in an expensive restaurant, where she may be having lunch with her lover — but none so funny it compensates for Jeff and Pat getting into the same kind of trouble, over and over. The ending, in which all the characters gather on a bridge, is preposterous, and may be a joke on the audience, but if it has anything to say about fate, destiny and coincidence, I just didn’t get it. This is a disappointing film which always felt as if a better one was trying to get out, and which the Duplass brothers may, of course, one day make. Still, disappointment isn’t the end of the world, as it’s known to be quite slimming. Heck, I was disappointed for most of last year, and lost nearly a stone!
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