Well, at least someones getting drunk.
  • Well, at least someone's getting drunk.

You're going to have to forgive me in advance, because This Is Where I Leave You has inspired me to drag out maybe the second-most-overused quote of all time, just after Andy Warhol's canard about 15 minutes of fame: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Maybe this was true when Tolstoy wrote it, but late-stage Hollywood has finally driven me to believe that it's not true anymore, that maybe the happy families are more interesting now that we've normalized, and even fetishized, unhappy families again and again on movie screens. The unhappiness is getting very same-y, and the dysfunction is starting to look awfully alike.

We've seen the family at the heart of This Is Where I Leave You a million times before in mainstream cinema. This time, they're the Altmans. In Parenthood, back in the 1980s, it was the Buckmans. There have been dozens of these dysfunctional families in the last decade: Little Miss Sunshine, Garden State, This Is 40. This Is Where I Leave You is exactly the same story as all those others, and it unfolds in as painfully predictable a manner as anything you've seen in movie theaters this year.

Though This Is Where I Leave You is based on a critically acclaimed novel by Jonathan Tropper, it feels like a hash of cinematic cliches. Five adult siblings must sit shivah after their father dies, and—get this—they all hate each other's guts. Jason Bateman plays the same wry down-on-his-luck schlub he perfected in Arrested Development. Jane Fonda gets a crack at the free-spirited mother clliche, though she's mostly just a vehicle for jokes about her character's boob job. Tina Fey turns in maybe her worst movie performance yet—and I say this as someone who has seen Admission—as a woman stuck in a loveless marriage who pines for a (literally) brain-damaged neighbor (Timothy Olyphant, looking mildly embarrassed to be there). Every character has one gaping wound that defines them and informs their every action: One couple can't conceive a child, Bateman just caught his wife in an affair, one of them just won't grow up, and so on.

The formula here is your basic Hollywood-style pop psychology, in which characters keep talking about their single Big Problem until they have a Serious Moment in which they Confront and Overcome Their Traumas, thereby becoming Whole. About two-fifths of the way through This Is Where I Leave You, Bateman's character laments the fact that he's always been so cautious in life, even though he's always wanted to just get on the highway and drive all the way north to Maine without a care in the world. I don't want to spoil anything for you, so I'll leave you to imagine what the last shot of the movie could possibly be.

There are bright spots. One scene involving pot and a fire alarm is pretty funny. Adam Driver is fascinating to watch, easily turning in the best performance in the film as the idiotic man-child of the bunch. Corey Stoll makes a decent supporting turn as the sibling who gets the least screen time. Rose Byrne is always charming. The camera is aimed in basically the right direction most of the time. But all this suburban angst is starting to get ugly; even gifted comedic actors can't transmogrify this bullshit into something attractive. At this point, after watching this most recent entry in a decades-long parade of dimbulbs and assholes learning how to love each other as family, you can almost hear Tolstoy howling from his grave: "This is not what I meant! This is not what I meant at all!"