This Is Where I Leave You (2014)
Directed by Shawn Levy
When their father passes away, four grown, world-weary siblings return to their childhood home and are requested -- with an admonition -- to stay there together for a week, along with their free-speaking mother and a collection of spouses, exes and might-have-beens. As the brothers and sisters re-examine their shared history and the status of each tattered relationship among those who know and love them best, they reconnect in hysterically funny and emotionally significant ways.
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Fey has screen time, but not much development to her storyline: Penny (Rose Byrne), an ice-skater who had a high-school crush on Judd, comes across as a weirdly familiar echo of enabling young women in funeral movies, such as Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown and Natalie Portman in Garden State.
I can rattle off a list off the top of my head from the last decade or so: Garden State, Margot at the Wedding, Rachel Getting Married, Elizabethtown, A Christmas Tale, August: Osage County, The Royal Tenenbaums (lots of Wes Anderson’s work, actually).
In many ways, it’s Garden State, Parenthood, and Home for the Holidays with a splash of The Big Chill.
Many films in the last few years from Garden State, Death at a Funeral, August: Osage County to the recently released The Judge, have used a variation of this increasingly derivative premise.
For a far more amusing film about mourning, seek out the 2007 British film, Death at a Funeral.
Eldest brother Paul (Corey Stoll, who was so great as Ernest Hemingway in Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris”), stayed in their hometown and runs the family’s sporting-goods store.
The week of enforced cohabitation stresses familial ties, but will prove oddly cathartic for Judd Altman (Jason Bateman), whose imminent divorce he's kept secret from siblings Paul (Corey Stoll, "Midnight in Paris," TV's 'The Strain'), Wendy (Tina Fey) and Phillip (Adam Driver, HBO's 'Girls') in "This Is Where I Leave You."