This Is Where I Leave You (2014)

Shawn Levy's 2014 adaptation of Jonathan Tropper's novel assembles an enviable cast and asks it to grieve in a living room for seven days. The ensemble is almost entirely white, and the family's Jewishness is offered as default texture, a fact of the household instead of a thesis. That is the extent of its representational ambition. There is no engagement with race. None with climate. None with body image. The family sporting goods business exists to give the eldest brother something to resent, not to invite an economic critique, and the workaholic husband is a plot inconvenience, not an indictment of late capitalism.

The one element carrying genuine social weight is Hilary's late revelation that she has fallen in love with Linda, the neighbor. It lands as a twist, and it reorganizes the final act, which makes it load-bearing instead of decorative. The film deserves credit for that. Elsewhere, Tina Fey and Jane Fonda are given interiority and agency, though the screenplay never argues a feminist position. These are simply women with problems. Horry Callen's traumatic brain injury is treated with a sympathy that stops short of any real neurodivergent consciousness. He is a casualty of the past, useful for Wendy's guilt.

Where the film might have lectured, it mostly does not. The coming-out scene and the family reconciliation arrive as emotional payoffs, timed for maximum dinner-table disruption, and the sermonizing stays light. This is a modest, well-acted picture that critics met with a shrug and audiences met with a B plus. It means well without meaning much. We file it accordingly, with a note of respect for the one scene where it actually risks something.