Jay and Mark Duplass (2011)

A comedy about (and made by) two brothers – although only one of them is named in the title they’re just about equally important in the story. Thirty-year-old single Jeff spends his days in the basement of his widowed mother’s house in Baton Rouge and many of his evenings watching Signs, a 2002 M Night Shyamalan film. Taking his cue from Shyamalan (I assume – I’ve not seen Signs), Jeff believes that everything in life is fundamentally interconnected – he’s looking for evidence to prove it and to make sense of his existence. Jeff’s elder brother Pat is, in comparison, a go-getter: he’s married and manages a paint store. We first meet Pat preparing a special breakfast for his wife Linda – to sweeten her up for the news that he’s bought the Porsche she’s sure they can’t afford. The early bits of Jeff, Who Lives at Home are oddly amusing, as Jeff pursues his conviction that an apparently wrong number call to the house, with an angry voice asking to speak to Kevin, is deeply significant. But it soon becomes clear – in the sequence in which Pat shows off then immediately and spectacularly crashes his new car – that the movie’s eccentricity is enjoyable but superficial. It’s going to rely on broad comedy. The unhappiness of Jeff, Pat and their mother Sharon, who has an office job, will be treated conventionally. As the Duplasses, who also wrote the screenplay, move to and fro between the main characters, things get pretty dull. The last quarter hour – when Jeff, Pat, Sharon and Linda all end up in the same traffic jam – is stronger. It’s no surprise, of course, that the foursome intersects in this way. Jeff, Who Lives at Home could be seen as a demonstration of the eternal verity that, when you’re making a commercial film, things have to be interconnected.

As Jeff, Jason Segel is consistently funny although he never looks to be trying to be. He doesn’t seem to have much range but it takes nerve to play straight and never let the need to make the audience laugh take over. Segel’s face is very open to the camera; however close it gets, it never reveals anything false. Ed Helms’s Pat is perhaps too obnoxious at first but Helms also plays true and his performance starts to gather momentum once we realise the effort that goes into Pat’s brittle self-assertion. Susan Sarandon, as Sharon, is more relaxed than I’ve seen her for some time. She also shows more comic flair than I expected. The identity of her secret admirer in the office is very obvious and the moment of consummation hardly less so but Rae Dawn Chong, as Carol, the co-worker who’s friendly with Sharon and wants to be more than that, is very likeable. Judy Greer keeps being cast as the wife of obnoxious men (she was the other half of the fellow who’d had an affair with George Clooney’s wife in The Descendants) but she and Ed Helms are good together. An argument between Linda and Pat in a motel is particularly strong – it’s well-written and convincingly structured, distressing and amusing. The film’s happy ending is willed. It’s what the Duplasses want for people whom they like – and want us to like too. The moral of the story seems to be that, even if your theory of interconnectedness has come up trumps, you’re still, at the end of the day, stuck in the basement on the lookout for more signs. Still, at the beginning of the day (the film’s action takes place over the course of less than twenty-four hours), Sharon was bothering Jeff to buy some wood glue to mend a slat on a broken cupboard. By the time night falls, the brothers have not only become heroes but the slat has been stuck back on.

14 May 2012