This Is Where I Leave You

Hollywood studios and indie filmmakers crank out a lot of dysfunctional family comedy/dramas for good reason; they’re easy to produce. Ensemble casts are affordable (no one star carries the picture) and can be packaged in a way that appeals to broad audiences as well as actors (who get to work with fellow thespians whom they like or admire without having to commit to long shooting schedules). The difficulty with these pictures is that, in order to hit all the demographics, they must walk a tightrope between broad, over-the-top comedy and heartfelt emotional melodrama. The more of these pictures get made, the more both ends of this tightrope get pulled in opposite directions. The comedy and the drama cumulatively become more and more forced in order to outdo all the similar films that have come before. Therefore, for every gem in this sub-genre, we get a pile of tedious, contrived failures--for every Silver Linings Playbook, Little Miss Sunshine, or Home for the Holidays, we get dozens of films like The Big Wedding, Our Idiot Brother, and Away We Go. Then there are the entries that seem, at first glance, like they’ll belong in the latter pile, but end up far more satisfying than they seem to have any right to be. These are films like August: Osage County, Crazy, Stupid, Love, and the unfortunately titled This Is Where I Leave You. (Despite sharing the name of the best-selling book it’s based on, no movie with a moniker this cumbersome is going to do well.)

This Is Where I Leave You is the story of four grown siblings who return home after their father’s death. Though none of them are religious, they’re forced to sit shiva for the full seven-day period, co-existing with each other, their significant others, and their eccentric mother. Predictably, each of the characters is going through some kind of life crisis, and their enforced proximity provides ample opportunity for old issues and tensions to come to a boil. Much of why this film works is the cast. The family is played by an odd grouping of talent: Jane Fonda as the wacky mother, Jason Bateman and Tina Fey as the dissatisfied middle children (and ostensible main characters), Corey Stoll as the oldest, most responsible, and most high-strung sibling, and Adam Driver as the youngest, least-repressed, and most reckless of the bunch. Despite the fact that these actors do not look at all related, they manage to present a plausible family dynamic. All create authentic, lived-in characters except Fonda, though the fault lies in the writing more than her performance. The mother is written as the kind of exaggerated embarrassing parent typical of this type of movie--especially in the early and later scenes.

The film features so many sequences (and even shots) that have become hallmarks or clichés of the dysfunctional family comedy/drama that you almost laugh when you see them. (When Bateman’s character arrives at a skating rink to meet up with the pretty girl who always had a crush on him in high school, twirling alone on the ice, I actually did laugh out loud.) But despite these trips down well-traveled terrain, the film succeeds because, at its core, its sentiments are honest. It delivers exactly what it promises: a moderately entertaining, relatable, and occasionally poignant story about growing up.