A Film Canon

Jeff, Who Lives At Home revolves around a day in the life of Jeff (Jason Segel), a thirty-year old trapped in slacker aimlessness; Pat (Ed Helms), his brother, trapped in a failing marriage; and Sharon (Susan Sarandon), their mother, trapped in a dead-end job. This would all seem to lend itself to indie stasis - and for the first five minutes or so, it feels like this is where the film is heading - but Jay and Mark Duplass quickly inject a propulsive energy, fragile and kinetic as a paper-plane, that translates stasis into momentum, or at least discovers a different kind of stasis in momentum, as the characters find themselves moving from being unable to move to being unable to stop moving. Not only does this prevent the narrative lingering on any character or scene for long enough to become ponderous or self-absorbed, but it transforms momentum itself into a kind of epiphany that finally expands into an ecumenical, radical vision of family-as-process, as something that is never by definition complete. This all creates a unique tone, bleak around the edges but essentially buoyant, that reflects the Duplass brothers' background in mumblecore melancholy, and its peculiar fusion of flanerie and comedy. At its strongest, it's like the rhythm of a road film condensed to a single town, or even a single neighborhood - a condensation that occasionally imbues it with the sheer physical ingenuity of an action film as much as a situation comedy, somewhere between Buster Keaton's interminable, ingenious bike rides and the communal, washed-out rhythms of Richard Linklater's Slacker.