[After reading this bust, you may be wondering how such a star-packed piece could turn out the way it does? Let's face it, they should all have known better. The fact the the screenplay was written by the author of the book on which the movie is based, may prove to be significant. Consider this a warning.]
This Is Where I Leave You (2014) is an American comedy-drama film directed by Shawn Levy, starring Jason Bateman, Tina Fey, Adam Driver, Rose Byrne, Corey Stoll, Kathryn Hahn, Connie Britton, Timothy Olyphant, Dax Shepard, and Jane Fonda.
In the end, separated 40-something, unemployed radio producer, father-to-be, Jason Bateman is talked into abandoning his even-keeled life, to date, and into joining in with the mid-life crises being experienced by his friends and family.
Coerced, along with his two brothers and sister, by their mother, Jane Fonda, into a traditional seven day period of contemplative mourning for their deceased father, confined within the family home, Bateman initially attempts to conceal the recent breakup of his marriage and loss of job, after catching his boorish, blank-shooting, shock-jock boss, Dax Shepard, in bed with his wife, excusing her absence from the wake on concocted health grounds.
Under constant needling from his sister, Tina Fey, whose own marriage has hit the buffers due to the regret she feels for abandoning her true love, Timothy Olyphant, the son of a family friend and neighbour, after he sustained a brain injury as the result of a past car accident that Fey was involved in, Bateman reveals all.
His separation is thrown into doubt, however, when his wife shows up unexpectedly, with the news that she is pregnant by him, prompting wife of his older brother and ex-girlfriend, Kathryn Hahn, to throw herself at Bateman in the hope that he, too, can get her pregnant, something his brother, Corey Stoll, has so far failed to do, despite Hahn enduring prolonged fertility treatments.
Persuaded by Fey that the way to get over his wife's infidelity, so that they can get back together, is for Bateman to be briefly unfaithful with local girl Rose Byrne, who he keeps running into and who still has a crush on him, no sooner has Bateman done the deed, than he has to rush to his wife's side, after she develops a complication with the pregnancy.
Despite realising, after Shepard shows up at his wife's hospital bed with the sole intention of handing her back to him, that he is going to have to have some sort of relationship with his wife, for the sake of their baby, Bateman nevertheless wants his romance with Byrne to be more than a one-time thing.
Suddenly overcome with jealously and frustration on discovering his, still not pregnant wife being consoled by Bateman, Stoll chases his brother out of the house and proceeds to pummel him, in front of a growing crowd of onlookers, until Fonda distracts everyone's attention by engaging in a prolonged lesbian kiss with their neighbour, Olyphant's mother, her secret lover.
In the aftermath of their mother's stunning revelation, Bateman resolves the brothers' long-standing dispute over the future of their father's sporting goods store, by persuading Stoll to take on their younger brother, recovered addict and reformed drug grower, Adam Driver, whose wayward promiscuity has just lost him the financial safety net he had found in older woman, Connie Britton, his therapist.
With his sister resigned to rejoining her husband, despite her continuing feelings for Olyphant, after assuring Byrne that he intends to continue their fledgling relationship, once he has sorted out the mess of his own, Bateman steals Driver's two-seater sports car, left to him by Britton, and heads north to Maine, an emblematic destination he had often contemplated, but never before had the nerve to seek.
Oy vey, this family likes to talk! The whole movie is basically exposition, peppered with one-liners, of decidedly variable quality, mostly referring to Fonda's recent extreme breast enhancement, her embarrassing candour over her married sex-life, and their evangelical rabbi's erection-related childhood nickname.
I never got a good enough look at the deceased to be sure of the gene pool the siblings issued from. But it wouldn't have surprised me if the father had turned out to be Larry David. They talk, and talk, and talk, and talk. And then they all talk some more.
They talked so much, in fact, that by the time Bateman got to deliver his climactic speech, the part of my brain that processes language had switched off. Very fortunately, the person he was delivering the speech to, thought it so good, that she handily summarised it, immediately after he stopped talking, for me and all the other people in the audience, who had similarly tuned out. Phew! And then he started talking, again. Argh!
Unless your idea of a good time is attending a Therapy Addicts Anonymous meeting, this is where you should probably leave this movie.
Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_Where_I_Leave_You
