Jeff, Who Lives at Home (2012)

Jay and Mark Duplass continue their respectable independent film career with Jeff, Who Lives at Home, their fourth joint feature collaboration. They have already made a name for themselves with the praise they've received from The Puffy Chair, Baghead, and, most of all, Cyrus. That praise has continued with this new movie, which is probably their most mainstream effort thus far. It stars Jaso nSegal as the title character, who lives in the basement of his mother (Susan Sarandon)'s house and really, really believes that absolutely everything has a purpose after having studied the events of the movie Signs. When his mother asks him to buy some wood glue to fix a broken shutter, Jeff runs into a man named Kevin, which he sees as a cosmic sign that does eventually lead him to discover that his brother (Ed Helms)'s wife is dating someone else. The wood glue will have to wait.

The Duplass brothers have a quietly quirky style in their work. The characters here are some of the most realistic people from their movies, but even then have some underlyingly odd characteristics. Jeff is naturally the most endearingly strange person on display, with his head full of pot and his mind full of conspiracy. The movie actually has more to do with the Helms character than with Segal's, though it couldn't get anywhere without him. This movie really surprised me, first by how calm and affectionate it was, and then by how funny it was. This, for the most part, is not a laugh out loud kind of comedy, but it does make you laugh in a familiar kind of way that actually makes the movie feel more distant than it possibly should.The events of the story unfold logically and in a very constructed manner, to the point that I wished it would have been a little more spontaneous. The novelty of Jeff's nonsense actually making sense wears off as we gradually begin to see where the movie is going and wish it could have been a bit more different. The seemingly random zooms in and out don't do anything but distract either.

Still, Jeff, Who Lives at Home does some good by being so quiet and charming. It will stay in my memory through the year even though there are funnier, more carefree comedies available. This is due, I suppose, to the same careful construction that also makes the movie falter. Any joy we get from the movie comes from a heavy manipulation, like it was all formed from a guide on how to move people with movies. In many cases, I would object to this, but this is one instance where the end result was more pleasant than it should have been and I enjoyed it more than it deserved.

7/10