This is Where I Leave You: slapstick and slapdash

Abstract

This is Where I Leave You is ostensibly a rollicking family comedy with a heart, all about the ties that bind and how difficult it can be to relate to grown siblings when you all live away and life has taken you in radically different directions. Jason Bateman stars as Jude, whose life has fallen apart after he walked in on his boss and his wife during a delicate moment. While wallowing in self-pity, his older sister (Tina Fey) calls to inform him that their father has passed away unexpectedly. Their mother (Jane Fonda, who is particularly poorly served by the material) informs them that their father (a non-observant Jew) has requested that his children sit shiva for him, which will require all of his children to live in their childhood home for 7 days. Conflict, predictably, ensues. Tina Fey summarises the overarching theme of the film, after two of her brothers have a fist fight in an emergency room: “You're idiots, but you're my idiots.” The film presumes that we all approach our families in a similar fashion, and views this attitude as an excuse for the abhorrent ways in which its characters behave. Films about and for adults are increasingly thin on the ground in US mainstream cinema, and films that directly (and maturely) address the grieving process are even rarer. Sadly, however, the death of the family's father is reduced to a B or C plot at best, and a great deal more attention is paid to Bateman's character rekindling his love life, the futile attempts of his older brother and sister-in-law to conceive a baby, and his younger brother's reckless, childish behaviour. Director Shawn Levy's film can also be distastefully lowbrow (including a particularly juvenile running gag involving a toddler carrying a plastic toilet around the house and making use of it at inopportune times), maudlin, and suffers from tonal shifts so sudden that it might give you whiplash. This is Where I Leave You is full of talented, likeable actors who have done good work in other films, but are let down here by a script that forces them to behave absurdly. There is hardly an action or a decision that these characters make that a real human being would actually entertain. This is Where I Leave You dresses up tired sitcom clichés about family, and expects to be congratulated for its bracing honesty and truth telling.