Jeff, Who Lives At Home

Year: 2011

Grade: B+

Country: USA

Director: Duplass

Review

reminded me a bit of magnolia in addition to signs which it explicitly references throughout the film. all the leads do a good job and ed helms turns in an uncharacteristic performance in that he plays a porsche driving jerk. jerks always drive porsches – bridesmaids is another example.

the characters are spot on in my estimation. jeff reminded me quite a bit of my old best friend phil, as well as my sister. he’s a ne’er-do-well pothead who lives at home and doesn’t exactly have his crap together. that is, until he gets a phone call and follows this “sign” everywhere it takes him. ultimately it’s a life-affirming film about taking control of your life, being honest, not wasting time and all that cheesy stuff. jeff is vindicated in the end because his hippie-dippy idea about following this sign ends up working out for everyone involved. everything comes together and maybe we even believe it a little bit because we want to. we want to think that everything we’re doing – all the precautions and training and experiences we have are leading to our being able to do great things at some moment in the present or future. if not then it’s a total waste of time, right? take shelter touched on this in a different way. he, too, was vindicated. what appeared to be psychotic was actually prescient.

sometimes people say that they have no regrets or that they wouldn’t undo anything that they’ve done in the past because if they did then it would mean that they wouldn’t be where they are at that moment. this is supposed to affirm that they are happy with where they are, i guess. i’ve said it before and sorta believed it at various times. but the truth is that of course i have regrets. there are things i should have differently or not done at all. i don’t think that doing a few things differently in the past would make me such a radically different person that i would have such a different outlook on life or be such a different person that all my relationships would be different.

ultimately i suppose it comes down to the fact that those mistakes (hopefully) make us less like to repeat them in the future. even that, though, doesn’t necessarily need to be true. if there were only some way of learning from the mistakes of others rather than making our own every step of the way. for some i guess this is the bible or others it could be listening to the regrets of those before them or aesop’s fables which outline as well as anything else the foibles of humanity. anyway, it was a really good movie.

Watched in theater