Jeff, Who Lives at Home (2012)
Directed by Jay Duplass
Dispatched from his basement room on an errand for his mother, slacker Jeff might discover his destiny (finally) when he spends the day with his brother as he tracks his possibly adulterous wife.
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While 30-year-old slacker Jeff spends his days huffing on a bong and repeatedly watching M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs, looking for instructions from the cosmos among seemingly random events, brother Pat (Helms) tries to keep wife Linda (Judy Greer in her best role yet) content while he lives beyond their means.
Mom (Susan Sarandon) and her eldest son, Pat (Ed Helms), head off to their dreary jobs while youngest son, Jeff (Jason Segel), assumes his normal place on the ratty couch in his mother’s basement, where he beings his daily musings on the ramifications of destiny and fate as they relate to his favorite film, “Signs.”
Segel's Jeff has a spiritual way of looking at life that mostly revolves around his appreciation for M. Night Shyamalan's movie "Signs," and the idea that everything is connected.
Instead, the opening scene sets the stage for everything that follows, as Jeff dictates a long monologue into a recorder about the importance of the movie "Signs" in his life.
With little drive or motivation outside of smoking pot in the basement, Jeff is inspired by his favorite movie, M. Night Shyamalan's alien invasion thriller " Signs ," as he waits for a signal that will hopefully reveal his own fated destiny.
He's a go-nowhere, do-nothing guy, preferring to smoke out and watch M. Night Shyamalan's Signs over and over.
If Segel's character has a spiritual heir, it's Jeff Bridges's character in "The Big Lebowski," although the search for a living room rug in that movie had more narrative drive than Jeff's desultory picaresque.
This is hammered home in unconventional ways, particularly with regard to Sharon’s arc; her friendship with a co-worker, Carol – played by Rae Dawn Chong, who served best as the hilarious comic relief in Arnie’s Commando almost thirty years ago – might seem especially obvious, but it unequivocally works.
Sharon's officemate Carol (Rae Dawn Chong, "Commando," "Cyrus") tries to dispel her anxieties that she's being made the butt of a joke and encourages her to be open to the romantic possibilities but anyone should be able to figure out what's really going on here too.
This writer is in the latter camp, but either way it's worth noting that the climax -- spoken of in broad, none-too-specific terms -- is a quantum leap forward for the brothers Duplass in terms of technical resources and scale of filmmaking -- no, they won't be making a sequel to "The Fast and the Furious" anytime soon, but compared to the small-room scale of their earlier works "The Puffy Chair" and "Cyrus," "Jeff Who Lives at Home" feels like "Avatar."
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While their principal character may have Signs on the brain, the fraternal filmmakers — who also wrote the script — give the impression of having watched 2008’s Step Brothers a few too many times.