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Film: Jeff, Who Lives at Home

Country: USA

Year of Release: 2012

Director: Jay Duplass and Mark Duplass

Screenwriters: Jay Duplass and Mark Duplass

Starring: Jason Segal, Ed Helms, Susan Sarandon, Judy Greer, Rae Dawn Chong

♥♥

Jeff, Who Lives at Home is an exercise in muddled meaninglessness disguised as something approaching an edgy, low budget independent film. The film tells the story of two brothers, Jeff (Jason Segal) and Pat (Ed Helms), neither of whom have exactly embraced – or been embraced by – the full breadth and width of the American dream, and both of whom are on their way to middle-age. Jeff, as the film’s title tells us, still lives at home with his long-suffering mother Sharon (Susan Sarandon) and is obsessed with the Mel Gibson film Signs, looking for hidden meaning in the texture of everyday life. A committed pothead, he has no job to speak of, and the only task on his list for the day in his life which the film chronicles is to replace a broken slat in a cupboard door.

But when Jeff receives a phone call looking for someone named Kevin, his simple DIY quest goes awry, the very word ‘Kevin’ becoming a signifier of infinite and universal importance. Sharon, at her wits end with her son’s lack of direction and drive, becomes obsessed with him completing the task at hand. Increasingly frustrated, she phones Pat, who is himself going through a particularly unconscious midlife crisis, the latest expression of which is the purchase of a Porsche, much to the chagrin of his wife (Judy Greer) who is more than a little unsatisfied with her relationship and who feels, quite accurately, that her husband never listens to her.

Through a series of coincidences, some of them the result of Jeff following anyone or anything with the name Kevin, the two brothers embark on a journey into one of cinema’s richest clichés, the life-changing day. But, as you might imagine, given my commentary thus far, the film fails to reap much of enduring value from such potentially rewarding territory. Meanwhile their mother is receiving anonymous messages on her computer from a secret admirer. Unable to view herself as a person with any romantically attractive attributes, she presumes it is someone having fun at her expensive. And as the narrative unwinds – although it is a very short piece of string indeed – she too discovers some supposedly valuable lessons about life, the universe and everything.

Ultimately, Jeff, Who Lives at Home is both a celebration of a particularly American mediocrity as well as a validation of it. The film suggests that all an unexpanded life requires is a quick and opportunistic exercise in redemption, and if you just follow the signs everything will work out swell and life will feel warm to the touch. But even within its narrow parameters, Jeff fails to engage at any substantial level. Located uncomfortably between a comedy and drama – but providing few laughs and very little dramatic tension – the film’s key sin is that, like its characters and the lives they inhabit, it is essentially boring. Even the presence of Susan Sarandon – who has little to work with here – cannot raise the film’s hollow tone.

That said, Jeff, Who Lives at Home does attempt to deal with the emotional dissatisfaction and ennui that is coursing through an American society whose middle-class is rapidly shrinking under the forces of globalisation and neoliberal economics. And, in the right hands, and given a script with a more audacious intent, all of this might have been riveting and offered real insight into a contemporary human condition that offers little in the way of metaphysical or spiritual dimensions. But it isn’t and it doesn’t. As to whether, Jeff will ever move out of his mother’s basement, the matter remains unresolved.