#jason segal

“I can’t help but wonder about my fate”

Stoner comedies get a bad rap - and deservedly so. While the vast majority of these movies (Dude, Where’s My Car?, the Harold and Kumar series, etc.) play these drug-induced capers for cheap laughs (“duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuude”), Jeff, Who Lives At Home, the new film from Jay and Mark Duplass, takes a far more realistic approach to drug use, creating a surprisingly charming and affecting subversion of the stoner sub-genre.

Jeff, Who Lives At Home follows the titular Jeff, a thirty year old man-child living in the basement of his mother’s house, whose only real interests are smoking weed, and his favourite movie, M Night Shyamalan’s Signs. His love for this film dominates his view of the world - everything he sees is construed as a sign, and these signs, when he finally decides to follow them, lead him to a variety of personal triumphs, as well a mystery involving a man named Kevin.

The most impressive element of the film is the characterisation of Jeff. On paper, and in many lesser films, Jeff would be someone to laugh at - his brother’s initial reaction to Jeff’s personality could be construed as a comment on this - but here he’s more than that: he’s interesting, caring, and, most of all, he’s incredibly kind hearted.

It’s this kindness that lends Jeff, Who Lives At Home its charm. By creating such a complex, hippie-ish, and interesting central character in Jeff, the Duplass brothers have achieved the feat of creating a profoundly heartfelt (and quietly hilarious) movie about a jobless thirty year old man-child living in his mother’s basement smoking weed all day trying to find his destiny.

And that kind of thing doesn’t happen by accident.