This is Where I Leave You

Shawn Levy’s This is Where I Leave You is an Altman movie. The Jewish family who reunites for the father’s shiva is named Altman. Moreover, like so many Robert Altman films this one uses a cultural institution to expose harsh truths about the current American social climate. It also includes such signature elements as off-the-wall dialogue, often black comic or profane, with a collection of nutbar characters airing barely concealed animosities, with overlapping dialogue and colliding egos.   

Like a Robert Altman film this one subverts its genre. It turns into an anti-RomCom. Normally the splintered courtships recover into marriage, with friendships restored, family ties strengthened. But here the film ends with two marriages broken, one threatened but restored, one affair broken and another perhaps to begin, and the lonely widow turning to a lesbian love. And the nice brother steals his kid brother’s Porsche. Levy’s lesson is Altmanic — the American promise of success and happiness is a delusion, which the Hollywood dream factory exists to confirm, and that only a maverick has the clear vision and irreverence to expose. (Hence Argo is rewarded for briefly helping the nation forget its incompetence and failure with Iran.) 

Here perhaps two outside figures provide the emblems for the main ones. One is the little boy exuberantly learning to use his potty. He embodies a life-changing moment, a turning point into a new level of maturity. The only adult who finds such joy in transition is Momma Hilary (Jane Fonda), whose candid memories of her marital sex life are only trumped by her revelation of a lesbian affair. Her children get only pain and grief at their turning points: Judd (Jason Bateman) finding his wife in bed with his boss, then learning she’s carrying his own baby girl; the puerile Phillip (Adam Driver) in an affair with an older, wiser woman, Tracey (Connie Britton), but losing her when he can’t resist a side dish; Paul (Corey Stoll) whose insecurity swells into jealous rage when he can’t impregnate his wife and risks losing control of the family sporting goods store. 

Sister Wendy (Tina Fey) has the maturing little son but is at the point of losing her semidetached husband. Worse, she still harbours a passion for her girlhood love Horry (Timothy Olyphant), whom she left behind when their car accident left him brain damaged. (When's the last time brain damage and its emotional consequences cropped up in an American RomCom?) If the little boy is an emblem of people moving on to new stages of life, Horry embodies stasis, being stuck in the moment unable to advance. His saving grace is that alone among his generation here he accepts his situation without resentment. Similarly, Hilary after reminiscing about her husband's humongous cock finds new bliss with the neighbour's little clitoris. 

The character who most obviously grows is Judd, who accepts both his wife’s desertion and responsibility for their child. He also resolves to live a more complicated life, in search of a more real relationship, presumably with the ice skater who had a childhood crush on him. As in Egoyan’s The Captive (see separate blog) the ice-skating heroine personifies the solitary search for grace in a harsh, cold hard-surfaced world.   

Apt for a therapeutic anti-film, there are two therapists here, both mature blonde women (post-Freudian?). Hilary wrote a bestseller about family relationships (of the physician heal thyself syndrome). Her female sensitivity and sense provided the royalties that enabled the men’s world, the sporting goods store, to survive. Tracey was Phillip’s therapist until they fell in love, a relationship she was the only adult not to see was doomed from the getgo. Tracey emerges reduced by the whole experience, Hilary enhanced not just  by her uplifting surgery but by her openness to a new form of love. Her shiva ploy sustains her family as her royalties did the store. 

This Altman family is wholly secular, so that the mother’s assertion of shiva comes from the spot where they used to put the Christmas tree. Still, the ritual gathering serves to remind the grievers of their bond, engages their community, and provides a ceremony that helps them get through both the loss of their father and their mutual antagonisms. “Boner” Grodner, the childhood friend turned rabbi, is a caricature of the new-style with-it “modern” rabbi who’s so detached from the traditional that his funeral prayer comes from The New Testamant. That’s his, not the film’s, goof. Perhaps the title draws more clearly on Jewish understanding. Lech lechah. God doesn’t like leaving but He approves becoming. Here the healthy characters find ways to be always becoming something more. That's what life's turning points are all about, from potty training to widowhood and all the disappointments, challenges and losses in between: at each point you leave your former self and advance. Or not.