The title of Jeff, Who Lives at Home announces a movie
that must be a variation on a now common theme: that of the young
male slacker in his late 20s and approaching middle age who somehow
can’t manage to get off his parents’ couch and grow up, as
generations past have done from necessity. This character shows
signs of becoming the great comic archetype of our time, as the
drunk was of the 1950s, and for the same reason — namely that he
is a kind of cultural memento mori, a reminder to us all
of what, even if we aren’t already, we might easily become. We
laugh at him partly to put some distance between us, but he’s
getting to be a very familiar figure. According to the
U.S. Census Bureau, “In spring 2011, 5.9 million young adults
age 25-34 (14.2 percent) resided in their parents’ household,
compared with 4.7 million (11.8 percent) before the recession, an
increase of 2.4 percentage points.”
Jeff, the movie, belongs to a sub-genre of its kind in
which the slacker meets the holy fool or demon lover. Others with a
similar theme include Our
Idiot Brother and Hesher and,
perhaps, in another way, Cyrus of
two years ago by the same auteurs, the Duplass brothers,
Mark and Jay (Baghead, The Puffy Chair), who are
loosely associated with the independent film movement known as
“Mumblecore.” As I understand it, this is a term used to describe
movies that seem to be not only about but by pot-smoking slackers.
They look back to the original slacker, Richard Linklater, whose
1991 movie of that name first popularized the term. In
Cyrus, the presence of a teenage son in loco parentis, as
it were, to the love-life of his single mother, together with the
weirdness of the son, played by Jonah Hill, gave the movie its
edginess, but Cyrus himself turned out to be only slightly scary
without being charismatic.
The Jeff of Jeff, Who Lives at Home, played by Jason
Segel, reverses that formula. At first he seems just a big doofus.
His brother, Pat (Ed Helms), calls him Sasquatch, and his size
reminds us all the more of the contrast between his adult
physicality and his childish mentality. But his claim on our
attention comes from a weird blend, though perhaps within the
limits of the normal for Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he lives, of
mysticism and moralism that expresses itself in an obsession with
M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs
(2002). That bit of schlock is all that Jeff has to cling to in his
attempt to find the sign that will give meaning to a life blighted,
as we are meant to understand, by the premature death of his father
some 15 years previously. I wonder if there could be an allusion
here to Hamlet? Certainly Jeff is as interested in, if not quite so
acute about, ultimate questions as Shakespeare’s great prototype of
the slacker youth. And Jeff, Who Lives at Home, unlike
Hamlet, observes the Aristotelian unities of time, place
and action (more or less).
Anyway, one day when Jeff answers the phone to a wrong number
and is asked to speak to someone named Kevin, he suddenly takes it
into his head that the name “Kevin” is the sign for which he has
been waiting, and he embarks on what appears to be a madcap quest
to find his destiny which — but then you know, more or less,
what’s going to happen in the end, don’t you? Just as Jeff is
complaining about “waiting forever to find out what your destiny is
and then, when you do, it’s really not that exciting,” it gets that
exciting. And when Mumblecore goes Hollywood and gives us the
expected miracle, we may be left in some doubt as to whether the
Duplasses are making fun of Mr. Shyamalan or trying to follow in
his footsteps.
As nearly as I can guess, they’re doing both. We may feel like
saying, as Pat does to Jeff, “I wish that I could see the world
like you. You have this belief in cosmic order. I really envy
that.” And when that belief is vindicated, we as much as Pat are
invited to come along for the ride. Moreover, compared to an Alien
invasion, what happens to Jeff suggests a leap into reality for the
newly-discovered meaning in his life, but in the end it proves to
be a reality the movie would rather retreat from. For not only Jeff
and his hardly more socially or economically functional brother but
even their long-suffering mom (Susan Sarandon) get their miracles
— albeit miracles of an everyday sort — and such over-egging of
the pudding is presumably meant to keep us from taking anything of
what happens here too seriously.
In other words, this is a fairy tale translated into the
unfamiliar language of slacker comedy which aspires to leave us
with what ought to be a highly serious Moral Message — but, then
again, maybe not. High seriousness, as the Duplasses remember
almost too late, doesn’t work in movies like this. The laughter
they’re getting better and better at generating acts as a kind of
permission for us to disregard the meaning Jeff ultimately finds in
his hitherto pointless and random existence, but that meaning
remains an awkward presence nonetheless, which many will prefer to
ignore. That neither Jeff himself nor his family, presumably, will
want to ignore it means that they are left imprisoned in the fairy
tale while we are likely to treat it, like the Moral Message, as
merely disposable. It’s a sad fate for these people whom we have
almost learned to like.
