“Everybody’s either sad or angry or lying or cheating,” Judd observes about the Altmans at one point. Fey is similarly wasted as the know-it-all, blabbermouth Wendy, whose past with a brain-damaged neighbor (Timothy Olyphant) is healed with the same perfunctory glibness as everyone else’s conveniently fraught-but-not-too-fraught story line. Bateman, playing Judd with the cuckold’s signature mix of bitterness and self-pity, evinces none of the superb timing or flickering deadpan wit that made him such a brilliant foil for the darkly zany antics of “ Arrested Development,” which, when it comes to dysfunctional families, only invites invidious comparison and longing speculation about whether it’s still available on Netflix.Īs the Altman matriarch, Hillary, Fonda does little more than showcase a pair of conspicuously fake breasts and spout the inappropriate musings of a therapist-mother with dubious boundary issues. In the case of Judd Altman, the sex life in question is actually his wife’s: When he surprises her at home on her birthday, holding an elaborately decorated cake with lit candles, the payoff will be painfully obvious even to someone coming in late from the concession stand. Director Shawn Levy - perpetrator of “ Night at the Museum” and other obvious, starchily paced comedies - clearly has no idea what to do with an ensemble of actors possessed of proven comic chops and bravura performances, here cast adrift on a continually ebbing tide of tight-lipped asides, strident outbursts and un-funny business having to do with a toilet-training toddler and the sex lives of the Altman siblings. Then again, at least Driver - who plays the black sheep of the Altman clan, gathered in suburban New York to sit shiva for their recently deceased patriarch - injects some unpredictable, and thereby remotely believable, energy into “This Is Where I Leave You,” which rounds so many formulaic bases that it might as well come with a handout punch card. And that motley tableau doesn’t even include Adam Driver, the scene-stealer from “ Girls” who in this bland, tonally incoherent large-format sitcom resembles less a member of the misbegotten family than a being beamed in from another universe. “ This Is Where I Leave You,” a misanthropic misfire adapted from Jonathan Tropper’s novel of the same name, wants viewers to believe many things, among them that even the most petty, bickering examples of bourgeois entitlement can be redeemed by pat third-act resolutions, and that “It’s complicated” passes for nuanced dialogue.īut perhaps its biggest stretch is demanding that the audience take seriously the notion that Jane Fonda, Corey Stoll, Jason Bateman and Tina Fey could ever be taken for blood relations. When you’re making a comedy about a dysfunctional family, shouldn’t it at least pass a simple genetics test?

This is where i leave you author