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"FacebookPinterest\n\n Jeff, Who Lives at Home is the new Depressed Man-Child comedy from Cyrus guys Jay and Mark Duplass. That means you know it's going to look like Cassavetes Lite before turning as heartwarming as a burnt marshmallow. This one is all about serendipity, with Jason Segel as the title character\u2014a 30-year-old Baton Rouge stoner living in his widowed ma's basement\u2014looking to justify his aimless life by staying receptive to any and every hint he's got a mysterious destiny.\n\n On the day the movie takes place, the cue turns out to be a wrong-number phone call from an angry dude asking for \"Kevin.\" That inspires our woozy hero to wander off after everyone and everything he spots bearing the name\u2014a basketball jersey on a fellow bus passenger, a delivery van\u2014when Mom (Susan Sarandon) sends him out to Home Depot on an errand. But instead of finding a Kevin who can tip him to the cosmos's plans\u2014or Home Depot, either\u2014Jeff soon bumps into his brother Pat (The Hangover MVP Ed Helms), a paint-store salesman who's every bit as curdled and cynical as Jeff is dreamy.\n\n That same morning, Pat's already rocky marriage to wife Linda (Judy Greer) has hit a fresh pothole, thanks to his ill-advised purchase of a sleek new Porsche. (If you guess that car isn't long for this world, bingo.) As for the boys' long-suffering mother, she's coping at work with office IM's from a \"secret admirer,\" who might be her co-worker Carol (Rae Dawn Chong). Did I mention that today is also Mom's birthday? \n\n Spotting Linda in a car with another man, Pat enlists Jeff to tag along with him and spy on the couple in the restaurant where they're lunching. From then on, it's Hokey Pokey time plot-wise, with everybody meeting up sooner or later in the course of their improbable afternoon. Cyrus-style, though, the tone is more frazzled and traumatized than it is zany.\n\n Depending on who you ask, that's either the Duplasses' biggest departure from the studio-comedy norm or just a new way of eating your cake and having it too. At one level, they get to keep their mumblecore cred with jittery scenes of intimate conflict: a confrontation between the brothers at their father's (conveniently located) gravesite, say, or a painfully well-done marital fight between Pat and Linda. But at another level, they're cooking up glib resolutions of those same conflicts with a shamelessness any old-school sitcom writer might envy. Under this movie's shaggy-dog surface is a lean racing greyhound aimed straight at the crowd-pleasing finish line.\n\n While I'm kind of attracted to the mix\u2014it's fresher than, oh, Nancy Meyers's version of comedy-with-heart\u2014the specious side of it does bug me. All the same, the Duplasses' approach sure does stimulate actors. Nobody gets a moment as great as Marisa Tomei joining John C. Reilly on \"Don't You Want Me\" in Cyrus, but Sarandon\u2014always better as a comedienne than a grande dame\u2014hasn't looked this interested in what comes next in years. Segel gives his usual demonstration of how to transform a one-joke character into a touching human being, and Helms turns being out of his depth into the keynote of his performance. Even so, the sizzler here is Judy Greer, who's awfully damned overdue to become an overnight sensation. What I'd give to see her play Ophelia opposite Segel's Hamlet. Talk about your one-joke characters, right?"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/tom-carson-jeff-who-lives-at-home>