[four-star-rating]Jason Bateman, Jane Fonda, Tina Fey, Corey Stoll, Adam Driver, Debra Monk, Rose Byrne, Timothy Olyphant, Connie Britton, Katherine Hahn, Abigail Spencer, Dax Shepard[/four-star-rating]
Families are never easy, and they’re never perfect. Everything is waaaay more complicated than it needs to be. Even with the best setup for normalcy, families can quickly get mired in dysfunction.
Such it is with the hilarious Altman household – so many comic jerks at the center of This is Where I Leave You. They all refer to themselves as “assholes” several times in the film. Even a famous psychotherapist mom (Fonda) cannot keep the clan from sinking into the muck.
And wow, what a lot of muck!
Bateman finds his wife, Spencer, sleeping with his boss, Shepard. Older sister Fey is in a loveless marriage with a man who cannot seem to remove the cellphone from his ear. Her childhood sweetheart (an underutilized Olyphant) still lives across the street and works at the Altman family business. Brother Stoll is trying to get his wife pregnant; the wife (Hahn) dated Bateman years before.
Got all that? It gets worse. Much worse. Baby brother Driver is involved in something Oedipal with older woman Britton, and even more soap opera secrets wait to be revealed.
In fact, the Altmans have more mental hang-ups than Freud ever catalogued.
The brood all come together to sit Shiva for their dad and husband – seven days in each other’s company, mourning together, as their worlds fall apart. Did I mention that this is a comedy?
It’s astounding the movie can keep it all straight. Unfortunately, it does so by giving some threads of the story short shrift.
It’s based on a book, and it’s clear their familial name is in homage to filmmaker Robert Altman, who crammed his own films with multiple characters and complications like this. TiWILY never lives up to that dedication. Director Shawn Levy (Date Night) can do sit-com moments, but he doesn’t offer a coherent, balanced experience. I kept feeling this material would make a better miniseries, or something like Arrested Development (which also starred Bateman).
Really, these actors don’t look or act like a family at all. Bateman, Driver and Britton are solid as individual performers. Fonda does a quite stagey turn with a fairly fun but one-dimensional role: the therapist mom who over-shares. Fey is always great at the humorous bits, but she is actually quite shockingly terrible at drama.
[rating-key]
That being said, TiWILY delivers some awesomeness. The dialogue is very, very funny; in fact, you’ll likely not go more than two minutes without laughing. Also, even though all of the Altmans are seriously flawed, the movie still makes them interesting and even empathetic.
I still feel this is just too complicated and too clever for a single film. Everything is chopped up, reduced. I would love to see it as a TV series, given some breathing space. Then again, Bateman and Fey would have to know that, if this were put on the boob tube, it would be endlessly compared to their other great comic works. Not ideal for sit-com actors trying to solidify movie careers.
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