This Is Where I Leave You (2013)
Cast: Jason Bateman, Tina Fey, Jane Fonda
Director: Shawn Levy
Country: USA
Genre: Comedy
Editor’s Notes: This Is Where I Leave You is now out in wide release.
Every family feels dysfunctional from the inside. Everybody has their tics, their tendencies, their tiny imperfections that are magnified a million times by constant proximity. People, even people you like, are hard to live with, and people you love can be the hardest. Perhaps that is why the subgenre of films about dysfunctional family gatherings continues to propagate—its something we can all relate to, because its something we all feel we’re living through.
This Is Where I Leave You ostensibly tells a story of an estranged family full of people with rough edges who gather and begin to grate on each other.
This Is Where I Leave You ostensibly tells a story of an estranged family full of people with rough edges who gather and begin to grate on each other. The film’s central problem, which it rarely transcends, is that it has sanded down the rough edges on these characters to the point that they cease to feel like people. Their collections of quirks contrast and intermingle so perfectly, they feel more like a puzzle put together to generate plot than characters thrown together to create drama. The characters in This Is Where I Leave You aren’t people so much as exposition machines who say things for no reason other than that screenwriter Jonathan Tropper (adapting his own novel) seems to think the audience won’t understand them otherwise.
It’s a shame, because these caricatures are brought to life by an insanely talented ensemble who are varying degrees of wasted in the film. Jason Bateman mostly coasts on his standard befuddled ambivalence as Judd Altman, whose life is falling apart when he discovers his wife is cheating on him and learns his father is dead. He returns home to sit Shiva with his family, and dramedy ensues. His siblings, played by Corey Stoll, Tina Fey, and Adam Driver, all have problems of their own, which are pretty much what you’d expect. Fey’s subplot is the most gripping of the three, though its best moments fall prey to the aforementioned shoe-horned exposition, and not even her well-modulated performance can salvage the material. Adam Driver is also very good doing what Adam Driver does, and one of the film’s best scenes finds their characters together and opening up.
The story and the performances are begging you to become invested in the Altman clan, but Levy never comes alive more than in an early scene involving a poop joke.
In fact, all of the film’s best scenes are one-on-one conversations where the actors are given a bit of room to find their characters. Not all of them are able to—poor Rose Byrne, usually so fantastic and funny a presence, is completely at sea playing Judd’s love interest, whose only characteristic seems to be that people say she is strange at her and she doesn’t disagree—but small moments throughout the film indicate that there is good potential lying beneath the cheap comedy and shambling mediocrity that makes up the majority of the film. Much of this can be laid at the feet of director Shawn Levy (The Internship, Date Night), who always seems to have trouble guiding funny people to a punchline, and seems almost indifferent to the affecting material that forms the film’s spine. The story and the performances are begging you to become invested in the Altman clan, but Levy never comes alive more than in an early scene involving a poop joke.
This Is Where I Leave You is one of those early fall films that has all the trappings of greatness but forgets to be any good, a star-studded dysfunctional family dramedy about how we’re all a little messed up that seems afraid to muss its characters beyond some vague notions of acceptable issues. With a cast this good, it takes a boring, color-inside-the-lines script and blasé, ineffectual direction to keep things from getting interesting. Unfortunately, This Is Where I Leave You has both in spades. It left me wanting more.
This Is Where I Leave You is one of those early fall films that has all the trappings of greatness but forgets to be any good, a star-studded dysfunctional family dramedy about how we’re all a little messed up that seems afraid to muss its characters beyond some vague notions of acceptable issues. With a cast this good, it takes a boring, color-inside-the-lines script and blasé, ineffectual direction to keep things from getting interesting.
