‘This Is Where I Leave You’ is a very wasteful film. It wastes an incredibly talented ensemble that clearly deserves to be in better films. It wastes a decent story with poor pacing and clichés that make it memorable only as you watch it. But most of all, it wasted my time and managed to somehow sidestep any and every opportunity it had to possibly be fun, real and downright enjoyable.
Jason Bateman stars as a man who, after learning his wife has been sleeping with his boss, loses his father. He returns to his hometown to spend a week reconnecting with his sister (Tina Fey), two brothers (“Girls”’ Adam Driver and “House of Cards”’ Corey Stoll), their families and his mother (Jane Fonda). During this week, Bateman’s character rekindles lost feelings for his old high school crush (Rose Byrne), each member of the family faces their own challenges of being grown-ups in long-term relationships and director Shawn Levy forces the audience to laugh while the movie is sad and cry when it isn’t.
There’s no point in naming any of the film characters, as I ended up remembering them only as celebrities acting. After all, they’re all just one-dimensional cutouts that you can see in any mindless film.
Bateman is the reasonable one that is the butt of lame jokes and unfunny slapstick; Driver is a wild and crazy spaz that demands laughs; Fonda is the feisty mother whose answer to everything has to do with sex (which apparently is funny because she’s in her seventies). Fey acts as the comic relief, whose great comedic ability has been reduced to her reactions to things while she says “Oh shit!”
Sadly, Stoll and Byrne are wasted even more, as Levy clearly can’t distribute screen time in an ensemble piece. Stoll is reduced almost to a cameo, until the movie feels the need to flesh out his character in the last 15 minutes. Byrne as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl is pushed aside and almost forgotten to account for the movie’s nasty amount of exposition that, not surprisingly, builds up to nothing. “This is Where I Leave You” finds itself left with almost a dozen characters that no audience member can relate to, as none of them rise above being a single adjective.
For being a comedy, we find ourselves rarely laughing. As a drama, we never get a chance to invest ourselves in into what’s happening on screen.
“This is Where I Leave You” ultimately finds itself trying to follow in the footsteps of films that simply better than it is. But, it’s at the cost of forcing its audience to suffer an intolerable family reunion as it fails to make any sense of what it’s trying to be.
_MOVE gives ‘This is Where I Leave You’ 2 out of 5 stars._