thoughts on This is Where I Leave You

Jason Bateman stars as Judd Altman, who in the early moments of This is Where I Leave You catches his wife (Quinn, played by Abigail Spencer) in bed with his boss, shock jock radio host Wade Beaufort (Dax Shepard).  Not long after, his sister Wendy (Tina Fey) calls to tell him that their father has passed away.  Not only that, their father wants Judd, Wendy, their siblings (Paul and Phillip, played by Corey Stoll and Adam Driver, respectively), and their mother (Hilary, played by Jane Fonda) to sit shiva for seven days.

This provides the impetus for the four siblings to descend on the family home with assorted spouses, romantic partners, children, and personal dramas in tow.  Judd arrives alone and makes excuses for why Quinn didn't come along; Wendy knows the truth and presses him to tell everyone until, of course, he loses it and winds up spilling the beans in front of a houseful of mourners.  Wendy has a husband who won't get off his cell phone and a toddler who carries around his plastic potty everywhere and drops his pants whenever and wherever he feels like it.  Paul and his wife, Alice (Kathryn Hahn), have been trying unsuccessfully to conceive for two years; at one point, Alice, who dated Judd before she dated Paul, tries to get Judd to impregnate her.  Phillip, the baby of the family, roars up to the funeral late, in a Porsche, and later introduces them to his much-older fiancée (Tracy, played by Connie Britton).  This is all proceeded over by Hilary, a therapist who is none too shy about showing off her new boob job and made her name with a book on child rearing that revealed details of her children's early sex lives that they would rather she had kept private (Paul used to masturbate with an oven mitt, for instance).  Also popping up now and then are Penny (Rose Byrne), a local woman who apparently had a huge crush on Judd when they were young; Horry (Timothy Olyphant), their neighbor and Wendy's ex-boyfriend, who hasn't been quite the same since a car accident and brain injury twenty years ago; Horry's mother, Linda (Debra Monk), who has grown close with Hilary in the wake of Hilary's husband's illness and death; and Rabbi Charles Grodner (Ben Schwartz), a childhood friend of the family who can't stand that they all still call him Boner.

Got all that?  It's all a bit crazy and confusing, but only because that's how visits home under trying circumstances are.  Certain things are familiar, yet others are a bit off; with a houseful of guests, Judd is relegated to a sleeper sofa in the basement that won't even fold out all the way, and the electricity always fails at the exact moment Judd has a headful of shampoo in the shower.  Phillip is gleeful to get to go out to a bar with his older siblings (he was always too young when they were all living in the same house)...but not long after they've all done their first shot, Paul is getting called away by his ovulating wife, and Penny's there eager to flirt with Judd.  The brothers have fights that devolve into wrestling around on the front lawn and, at one point, accidentally set off the fire alarm sneaking a joint at Temple.  Judd catches Wendy doing the walk of shame home from Horry's house.  Judd actually gets away with spending the night with Penny...except then Quinn is showing up with big news.

As with many movies that are adapted from books, as this one is, there are a lot of things you find yourself wanting to know more about, yet it still feels a bit too long.  Yet it plays out better on the screen than I remember it playing out on the page; the actors' performances are grounded in reality, making it seem less self-consciously funny and outrageous than I remember the book being.  Bateman, Fey, Stoll, and Driver are believable as siblings; these characters don't spend a lot of time together on a day-to-day basis (Paul is the only one who still lives in their hometown) and aren't the kind of siblings that would refer to each other as best friends.  Yet there is an easy dynamic between them that feels comfortable and familiar; there are old resentments between these siblings, to be sure, yet you can tell that they all would be there for each other in a second if they needed to be.  I liked the way that so often the other people in the siblings' lives just faded into the background as the four of them gravitated to each other.  These are people that know each other's shortcomings (when asked, Judd tells Tracy that yes, there is a good chance that Phillip has cheated on her with his ex-girlfriend; Wendy tells Judd that if he had really loved Quinn, he would have noticed that she'd been cheating on him for a year) yet always have each other's backs (Phillip cheerfully calls Quinn a "heartless slut" to her face; Wendy punches Wade in the face when given the opportunity).  Their interactions feel real.

I enjoyed it a lot.  Funny, touching, great cast.  I'd recommend.