Only Connect

Segel and Helms can't relate in Jeff, Who Lives at Home.

***1/2  Jeff, Who Lives at Home.  Written and directed by Jay & Mark Duplass. 

Based on the title and the marketing, you might suppose Jay and Mark Duplass’ Jeff, Who Lives at Home is some kind of slacker comedy—the kind of thing the soft, round spirit of Seth Rogan hovers over like a sweet puff of bong smoke.  But it turns out that Rogan isn’t in this movie, and you’d be wrong in assuming much about what the Duplass brothers have cooked up.

            Jeff (Jason Segel) is a soft-bodied sasquatch of a guy who lives at home with his mom Sharon (Susan Sarandon). His lifestyle does involve plenty of couch time and yes, a bong. But Jeff is lazy only in the way a permanent existential crisis can inspire—weed and solitude have made him into a kind of suburban yogi, on a never ending quest for snacks and his place in the cosmic order. Things get interesting when his mom sends him on an errand to Home Depot, and he meets up with his brother older brother Pat (Ed Helms). The latter is the sibling who’s made all the ”right” choices—job, marriage, expensive toys like a Porsche. But things are not so good for the dickish Pat, as his wife (Judy Greer) may or may not be having an affair, and only the reluctant Jeff can help find out the truth.

            The comedy here rarely involves big laughs, but lies more in the realm of “funny ‘cause it’s true”. The Duplass’, meanwhile, have released Jeff against a highly topical discussion of so-called “boomerang kids”—the estimated three million US adults in their twenties forced by unemployment to move back in with their parents. These are not always underachievers, mind you, but young people who perhaps foolishly believed that their prime years would bring them more opportunities than careers in tech support or the day shift at Applebee’s. Public debate usually involves questions like “what’s wrong with these kids?”, but the Duplass’ (Baghead, Cyrus) have a more nuanced view of the issue, framing it not in terms of right or wrong but of comparative fulfillment. Pat and Sharon may have jobs, but they don’t necessarily have purposes; Jeff may wear nothing more complicated than gym shorts, but he seems to grasp our profound need to, as E.M. Forster famously said, “only connect”.

            As he did in Freaks and Geeks and the surprisingly human Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Jason Segel explores new modes and colors of oafishness here. The contrast with Ed (The Office, The Hangover) Helms, who has long cultivated an image of insanity in a bland package, is not exactly subtle but it works. They look nothing alike, but as brothers who both need and loathe each other they are more than plausible. The only weakness is that the plot strand involving Susan Sarandon—an office romance with a surprising twist—seems cut off in its own narrative universe. If the brother Duplass’ had found a way to make the plot strands of Jeff connect as well as its characters, it might really have been worth getting off the couch for. 

© 2012 Nicholas Nicastro