THIS IS WHERE I LEAVE YOU
DIRECTOR: Shawn Levy
CAST: Tina Fey, Jason Bateman, Jane Fonda, Kathryn Hahn, Adam Driver, Timothy Oliphant, Corey Stoll, Debra Monk
CLASSIFICATION: 16 LSD
RUNNING TIME: 103 minutes
RATING: ***
DIRECTOR Shawn Levy manages to find all the drama inherent in a family funeral without turning it into one big joke.
It’s pretty funny then (in a non-haha way) that the story sinks under the weight of a clichéd narrative. We can see where the storyline is going.
What keeps us watching is the strong ensemble cast who create relatable characters.
Jane Fonda is matriarch Hilary Altman, who calls her four children home to sit shivah when their father dies. They’re not a particularly religious bunch, but agree to honour their father’s wishes. So there they sit, talking to visitors and each other while their lives go on around them.
Relationships, work, taking care of children, trying to have children – all these things becomes issues and problems when surrounded by the people who know you too well to just let you get away with a mediocre job.
Tina Fey is only sister, Wendy, who forms the inadvertent mainstay of the family. Each of the brothers relate to her in a different way and she knows them inside out.
Fey gets to exercise her dramatic bones and does so in a low-key, warm manner.
Jason Bateman’s Judd gets the most screen attention as the brother whose life is the messiest, although youngest brother Phillip (Driver) is no slouch in making and finding trouble.
Judd is having a terrible year – he caught his wife in bed with his boss, so there go wife and job – and his father’s death has left him emotionally stunned.
Phillip is the baby of the family, allowed to coast and a big baby because of it, while Paul (Stoll) the eldest takes that role way too seriously.
Fonda’s matriarch keeps it together with the help of lots of little pills, but she’s blitzed out of her mind purely to get through particular parts of her life – it’s not a lifestyle choice. This makes her character very different from Meryl Streep’s darkly twisted mother in August: Osage County.
While it doesn’t quite go for the sarcastic jugular, there is an honest streak running through this talk-heavy film.
Funerals bring out the best and worst in people because they’re emotionally vulnerable.
Any viewer who has ever had to deal with a family funeral will recognise the mix of tenderness and hard-nosed pragmatism that the family dole out to each other.
If you liked The Family Stone or Because I Said So, you will like this.
Mourning with family a bonding exercise of note
IN Long Island, New York, an idyllic white house sits tucked behind a beautifully maintained rose garden and picket fence – nothing out of the ordinary for
this sleepy neighbourhood.
Inside, it’s a different story.
A film crew sets up camera and sound equipment in the living room. Upstairs, a host of movie stars crack jokes and swop stories.
This is Where I Leave You has a red-hot ensemble cast playing a family and their various spouses, old flames and might-have-beens, led by Jane Fonda playing the family matriarch.
There’s a reason why this project has attracted such a wealth of talent. Based on the hilarious bestselling novel by Jonathan Tropper, This is Where I Leave You tells the story of the Altmans, a messed-up family.
When their father dies, four siblings are forced to reunite under one roof to spend seven painful, funny and extremely awkward days in close proximity. Over the ensuing week, the contentious clan will either find common ground at last… or kill each other.
“I read the book five years ago,” says Shawn Levy, the director overseeing all the craziness.
“The story is both very funny and sad. It’s really just about how your family can drive you crazy, but sometimes they can be the one thing that redeems you.”
The idea for This is Where I Leave You occurred to lauded writer Jonathan Tropper after his own traumatic divorce. He adapted his own story for the screen.
Levy, on the other hand, came in with a frame of reference. “Having been through it a couple of times, to sit and mourn like this reminds you that you’re part of a family and web of friends. In the moment where your impulse might be to retreat, it forces you to reconnect.”
On set, the director – the man behind the hugely successful Night at the Museum movies, Cheaper by the Dozen and Real Steel – is changing direction in a big way.
“When I was at film school, I always thought I’d do small, intimate, bitter-sweet movies,” Levy says. “Then I started to find success with bigger, broader comedies, often with a lot of visual effects. Finally, after 10 movies, I’m getting to do what I thought I’d do with my first. This is wildly different for me – no robots, no dinosaurs, no green screen – and it’s proving even more rewarding than I’d hoped.”
Wendy Altman, Tina Fey’s character, is a wife and mother as well as a professional, whose trip home reconnects her with her high school sweetheart Horry, played by Timothy Olyphant. “I love Wendy and her story,” says Fey. “Horry, who lives across the street from the Altman family home, was the love of her life, until a life-altering event when they were 20 changed all that. Wendy made the pragmatic choice to move on and marry someone else, and she’s burdened by that.”
Bateman, another actor known best for comedy, says: “I don’t understand this tradition a lot more than my character does,
but it’s a great dramatic device to trap family members together.”
Not one of the Altmans is doing particularly well in the relationship department. While Judd has been cheated on and Wendy is trapped in a loveless marriage, eldest brother Paul (Corey Stoll) is experiencing his own tension with wife Annie (Kathryn Hahn) because of
their inability to conceive. Their frantic efforts to do so lead to some particularly awkward (and funny) moments in the Altman house.
“There’s also the added stress of Paul being the one who has to take care of the family business. He’s a cranky, uptight guy and really has his walls up: over the seven days, they get chipped away.”
The final sibling is Phillip, the baby and the rebel of the family.
To play this lovable but erratic free spirit, Levy only had one person in mind: Adam Driver, the breakout star of HBO’s Girls. “I auditioned every actor between the ages of 20 and 40 and at the end of it, I said, ‘It has to be him.’ There’s no one in the world like Driver,” said Levy.
Driver says: “Phillip comes in thinking, ‘This is the perfect opportunity to finally get to know my older brothers and sister and bond with them.’ But he finds it difficult to come back to people who were there when he was in diapers.”
Each of the Altman siblings has been shaped to a great extent by their mother, Hilary, an open, albeit over-sharing, child psychologist.
“A lot of the tensions simmering under the surface in the Altman family can be traced back to their mom,” says Stoll. “She wrote this book about how to raise your children without any boundaries.”
For Levy, it quickly became clear who would be perfect to play this larger-than-life character: Jane Fonda. She turned out to be
so excited by the role and story that she insisted on auditioning for This is Where I Leave You, despite having more than 40 movies and two Oscars under her belt.
“This is my favourite kind of movie,” says Fonda. “It’s funny, but it’s real. There’s poignancy. I’ve made a lot of comedies, but I’ve never done improv before with young, cutting-edge comedians. I’m awestruck by them. That works for the story because the mom feels very alienated from her children.”
Fonda sees similarities between Hilary and herself, not least the tendency to over-share information. Everyone on set confirms that Fonda is not shy when it comes to body matters. “She is very, very candid,” says Levy. “And that applies to the fake breasts she wears in the movie too. Her character decides to get herself a new set before going on a book tour, so we hired a prosthetic artist and flew in these gigantic things. Jane was walking with these amazing breasts. On the set… We were all averting our eyes!”
Tina Fey confirms the story. “Yeah, Jane was very entertained by the set of prosthetics.”
Amazingly, Fonda is mentioned in the book This is Where I Leave You: in one passage, Judd remembers finding his mother working out to one of Fonda’s famous fitness videos, then telling her she’s prettier than the star.
“It’s crazy,” marvels Tropper.
In the kitchen of this tidy Long Island home, there’s a lot of food and a lot of tension. The food has been supplied by friends of the Altman family, visiting to pay their respects: there are heaped platters of fruit, enormous trays of salmon slices and towering cakes.
The tension, meanwhile, is courtesy of the scene being filmed between Judd Altman and his recently estranged wife, Quinn. Having been discovered by Judd in flagrante with his arrogant boss Wade (Dax Shepard), Quinn is now visiting to deliver news that will further rock his world.
As the story unfolds, other characters are drawn in. There’s Penny, Judd’s old high-school flame, played by Rose Byrne (Bridesmaids). Tracy, Phillip’s much older girlfriend, played by Connie Britton (Nashville). And Linda, the Altmans’ next-door neighbour, played by Debra Monk (Grey’s Anatomy).
The movie’s brisk 32-day shoot began with a scene at a synagogue.
The Altmans have left the confines of the family house for a service led by a young rabbi, played by Ben Schwartz, who, much to his displeasure, has been unable to shake his childhood nickname, “Boner”.
While everyone else is listening to Boner’s sermon, the three Altman brothers sneak out to get stoned in a classroom. There’s unanimous agreement among the cast that Bateman is the best at pretending to be high. “Well, it’s practice,” deadpans the star.
The scene is a rare moment of bonding for the Altman brothers. More often they’re quarrelling, while at one point in the story there are actual fisticuffs on the lawn of the family house.
For Levy, This is Where I Leave You is the film that “has just let me say what’s really in my heart. It’s about a guy who comes into this moment completely unanchored to anything. His wife has cheated on him; he’s not close to his mother, brothers or sister. But little by little, he comes back to life. The journey starts off as, ‘Oh no, seven days with my family…’ and ends with ‘Thank God, seven days with my family…” – Warner Bros.