Film review: Jeff Who Lives At Home (15)

Directors: Jay Duplass, Mark Duplass

Running time: 83 minutes

***

JAY and Mark Duplass are best known for shoogly studies of aimless young men, including Jonah Hill’s creepy manchild in Cyrus, and The Puffy Chair, a cultish offering about a man delivering a recliner for his dad’s birthday. Jeff Who Lives At Home doesn’t take them far from their comfort zone. Forgetting Sarah Marshall’s Jason Segel stars as Jeff, an underachiever who is in his thirties but still living at home with his widowed mother (Susan Sarandon).

Jeff is happy lounging on a sofa in her basement with his bong, obsessing over the details of the Mel Gibson movie Signs, and wondering if there’s a metaphysical fate sending out signals to him, disguised as coincidence.

Little does he realise that his own life will change forever when he’s forced out of the house to buy wood glue, causing him to reconnect with his big brother, Pat (Ed Helms from The Hangover).

Pat is more functional than Jeff, but also awful, abrasive and currently suspicious that his fed-up wife Linda (Judy Greer) is having an affair. The wood glue mission is abandoned and instead Jeff is sent to eavesdrop on Linda. Meanwhile Sarandon is receiving mysterious messages at work from a secret admirer, and is keen to ferret out his identity with the help of a workmate (Rae Dawn Chong, dangling the more intriguing question of where she’s been since the 1980s).

All this makes Jeff sound rather action packed. Actually you can count the sprocket holes in the projector during its many longueurs, until the Duplass brothers finally draw the disparate threads together and throw you a bone to reward you for all that attention.

I’m ambivalent about the merits of mumblecore – low-budget independent film that places an especially high value on shaggy storytelling. One problem is that however quixotic Jeff’s adventures turn out to be, this feels like yet another naturalistically boring couch story about the existential crises experienced by immature men when they are required to act a little more like adults, and a little less like a self-indulgent dudes. They might be like real people, but are they anyone you would particularly care to spend time with?

Another issue is the lack of momentum, which leaves Jeff Who Lives At Home permanently stuck at a postcode between droll and dull.

Admittedly it does warm up from an exercise in chatty awkwardness into something slightly more appealing, but almost self-detonates with a climax that is a forced attempt to author Jeff’s notion of predestination.

Big on artistic ambition, and microscopic in point, at least it offers an alternative to Hollywood’s mainstream overworked, and overfamiliar fictions.

If that’s fine by you, then maybe it’s worth wandering across to the cinema. «

Siobhan Synnot

On general release from Friday