Jeff, Who Lives at Home (2012)

The Duplass brothers have built a career on the small gesture, and Jeff, Who Lives at Home is their most patient exercise in it. A thirty-year-old stoner named Jeff (Jason Segel) sits in his mother's Baton Rouge basement, parsing the universe for signs, convinced that a wrong number for a man named Kevin is destiny calling collect. The film follows him through a single day of errands, a mugging, a Hooters parking lot, and an increasingly battered Porsche belonging to his brother Pat (Ed Helms). It is a movie about people who cannot articulate what they want, made by filmmakers who decline to articulate it for them. The result is warm, shaggy, and content to let its meanings drift.

The social content here is modest and mostly incidental. Susan Sarandon's Sharon spends her birthday at a cubicle, fielding an anonymous admirer who turns out to be her colleague Carol (Rae Dawn Chong). The two women, neither of whom claims any prior attraction to her own sex, leave together for New Orleans. It is a genuine same-sex development, handled with the film's characteristic softness, offered as one more quiet turn in a day full of them. Sharon's dissatisfaction with her life reads as midlife melancholy, not a manifesto. Pat's yuppie purchases are gently mocked, and Jeff's spiritual searching is gently indulged, but the film never reaches for a thesis. Rae Dawn Chong and Evan Ross appear in the supporting cast without the film making a point of them.

Where the film excels is in refusing to lecture. Its observations arrive as whimsy, not instruction, and the reunion on the bridge, complete with a rescue, a near-drowning, and a belated birthday, earns its sentiment honestly. The closing image of Jeff finally buying the wood glue is a small joke about purpose that lands because nothing has been overstated. This is a film with progressive instincts worn lightly, the kind of lightly that suggests they were never the point. It wants to be liked, and mostly it is.