Jeff, Who Lives at Home – review

Jay and Mark Duplass are the mumblecore directors whose film-making diction is gaining in clarity and volume. This likable, laid-back comedy is a quasi-stoner parable featuring Susan Sarandon as Sharon, a woman worried about her two grownup sons: Pat (Ed Helms) is an obnoxious middle-manager obsessed with status; Jeff (Jason Segel) is an amiable slacker and weed enthusiast who still lives at home and is obsessed with the M Night Shyamalan film Signs ; one day a quirk of fate sends him on an odyssey of adventure, meaning and personal growth. The film is watchable and often funny, but still seems encumbered with a kind of Sundance-indie self-consciousness, and I wondered if, in the end, it was doing anything more than the far more unassuming and gag-packed Harold & Kumar movies. Yet what is interesting is that the entire action of the film, right up to its final revelation, could be played as a dead straight, emotionally choked drama of the cosmic supernatural. Helms and Segel have a great scene when Jeff has to spy on Pat's wife having an illicit lunch with a co-worker, effectively "bugging" their conversation with his mobile phone. It's all part of his entertaining ramble to an unexpected destination.