Jeff, Who Lives at Home features Jason Segel (The Muppets) as unemployed slacker Jeff and Ed Helms (The Hangover Part II) as his employed brother Pat, who is having marital troubles. Susan Sarandon (Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps) plays their mom, who has assigned Jeff a very important and seemingly straightforward task: to take the bus to Home Depot and pick up wood glue, since one of the window shutters in the house has fallen off. Before Jeff leaves, however, he gets a mysterious phone call, where someone asks to speak to Kevin. Jeff takes this as a sign, and when he sees someone on the bus with a jersey that says "KEVIN" on the back of it, he follows him.
Pat finds Jeff wandering around outside of Hooters, where Pat is conducting a "business meeting," as he says, with a friend of his. Pat wants to show off his new Porsche so he takes Jeff for a ride, where they ultimately end up crashing the car. The movie rolls on from this point, with Jeff still following any "Kevin clues" he can find, and Jeff's story eventually tying in with Pat's, including him confronting his wife (Judy Greer, The Descendants) about possible infidelity on her part.
Jason Segel is pretty good at playing a stoned slacker, and Ed Helms was great as his "man child" brother, who thinks that buying a Porsche is more important than saving for a house (he and his wife live in a small apartment). The movie did have a few "laugh out loud" moments, and I liked how the end tied the film together nicely. Susan Sarandon has a funny role as the mother of these two, who knows that Jeff is a slacker which is why she assigns him to go to Home Depot, and hopefully get him out of the house.
Maybe see this film. It's a little slow, but overall I enjoyed it, and I think that others will as well. I've heard it compared to Cedar Rapids, another Ed Helms film, in that it's more "quirky" than "funny," but I appreciated the laughs that it did provide during certain scenes and dialogue. This is definitely an "indie" movie but it's one that will probably appeal to most because of the casting (Segel, Helms, Sarandon, Greer, and others), and it will be interesting to see if it does well at the box office.
Jeff, Who Lives at Home is in theaters now and is rated R with a runtime of 83 minutes.
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Liz Parker is a 2009 graduate of the University of Michigan. She currently works as an Assistant Medical Editor for a pathology website. Visit her at her movie blog Yes/No Films