Jeff, Who Lives at Home

Jeff, Who Lives at Home (2011)

written and directed by Jay and Mark Duplass

Sharon (Susan Sarandon) is a widow with two alienated, indeed antagonistic, sons. Jeff (Jason Segal) is a 30-year-old pothead who hasn’t had a relationship since high school. He stays in his mother’s basement retreat waiting for some sign that will bring him his destiny. Pat (Ed Helms) wears a paint-store logo but we don’t see him at work. When he buys a Porsche Boxter on credit he infuriates his wife Linda (Judy Greer) and drives her to think of leaving him for a more sensitive nebbish, Steve (Steve Zissis). At work Sharon is flattered by texts from “a secret admirer” who turns out to be her friendly colleague Carol (Rae Dawn Chong).

Each member of that family starts out angry because all dream of living a big life. That’s the domestic version of US exceptionalism. The mother is mad that her fantasies have been frustrated, especially her hopes for her sons. Pat is angry that his wife doesn’t understand how the Porsche will restore excitement to their lives. His detachment infuriates her. Jeff is frustrated that he isn’t getting his expected supernatural direction (He draws his religious faith from the film Signs). 

Eventually all three characters learn that their lives don’t have to be big. What rather counts is the small human connection. A massive traffic jam enables them to advance where it counts. The mother finds an unexpected intimacy, nonsexual, with the woman.They “get” each other; who needs more? Pat realizes and admits that he wants to be in love with his wife again, i.e., to recover the modest destiny that he abandoned for the delusions embodied in that Porsche. Jeff’s faith in signs led him to perform an act of heroism (he saves a father and his two little daughters from drowning). But he finds that even that “big” event is not as important as his small role in helping his brother and mother find their satisfaction. In the TV report of his heroism we don’t see him named or shown. He leaves the report to go repair the window shutter that his mother has been begging him to fix. That’s the glue that binds.

Now, we tend to think that Canada/Canadians live the small lives and the US/Americans get the big lives. Certainly that’s one effect of America’s historic tendency to mythologize itself. But along comes this American film, with major actors (Helms, Sarandon), that privileges the small life, the intimate connection, over the grandiose. The film also counters our sense, especially encouraged by the current political theatre, that America has lost its ability and willingness for self-criticism, self-analysis. (As it happens, the theatre review in the current New Yorker stresses a similar theme in the revival of Death of a Salesman.)

The film also eschews the pat ending in favour of an abiding sense of process, of incompleteness. Hence the title. A comma-free “Jeff lives at home” would be a complete sentence, period, finis. But “Jeff, who lives at home” dangles unfinished. It has no predicate so it’s a fragment, not a sentence. That reflects the characters’ initial fragmentary nature, in their relationships and in their lives. Jeff is also the subject with particular regard to how he “lives” at home. At first he seems to be in suspended animation. But as he engages with his brother’s troubles Jeff comes alive, he functions, he acts on his “sign” and becomes a hero. But his more fulfilling destiny is to live, really live, not in the headlines or the cosmos but at home, with his nearest and dearest. Thus valorizing the domestic, the modest, seems much more Canadian than American. But it’s hard to speak of “the American.” There are so many different “Americans,” some indeed downright Canadian.