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It's all in the family

Film
This Is Where I Leave You (M)
3.5 stars
Jason Bateman, Tina Fey
DIRECTOR SHAWN LEVY
REVIEW MARK NAGLAZAS

There's an unwritten law in film and television that if a character is having sex with someone other than their partner, watching porn on the computer or simply self-pleasuring, somebody will walk in on them.

Does this happen in real life? Don't cheating couples think it would be better to find a place where they won't be disturbed and wouldn't a porn aficionado think to lock the door or put a chair under the door handle or have the family pooch stand guard (I know a little bit too much about this).

This is Where I Leave You is so shameless in its use of this device it appears in the first five minutes, with a radio show producer named Judd Altman (Jason Bateman) arriving home early with a birthday cake for his wife (Abigail Spencer) only to stumble on her in bed with his boss, a crass shock jock played by Dax Shepard.

Shepard's professional loudmouth is single and no doubt has a swanky apartment to go with his expensive car but it dawns on neither that it might be better to use his place than the marital bed. But what good is it walking in on a bonking bachelor?

Indeed, almost everything in the first half hour of Shawn Levy's adaptation of Jonathan Tropper's novel This is Where I Leave You is familiar to the point of cliche - a family patriarch dies, the bickering children return home to their small town and encounter the friends and lovers they left behind, the surviving mother is a free spirit who embarrasses everyone with her openly sexual chatter and so forth.

While we've seen it all before (as recently as The Judge, in fact, sans the lewd old girl) Levy has assembled such a talented cast and orchestrates proceedings with such finesse that it is feels fresh, a rare comedy-drama in which the laughter and the tears spring from the same source.

We get a snapshot of Levy's sure-handed modus operandi in the opening couple of scenes, with Tina Fey's Wendy Altman phoning her brother Judd (Bateman) from the hospital and telling him that their father has died, while in the background their feisty mother (Jane Fonda) is ripping out the old guy's intravenous lines so he looks more presentable.

Fonda's Hillary, a celebrity psychologist who used her family as source material for her best-selling book Cradle and All (shades of Gone Girl), continues to embarrass when her four children arrive at the family's swish Westchester home for shiva, the traditional Jewish period of mourning.

Proudly displaying the new pair of boobs which she has purchased for her coming book tour, Hillary opens up about her exuberant sex life with her late husband. "The passion, the creativity, the angles - Mort really knew his way around a woman's body," Hilary tells the mourners, with the children wanting to curl up and die.

However, the real focus is the relationship with the children who are all at a crossroads. Judd is torn between returning to his wife and vivacious local girl (Rose Byrne), Wendy battling to hold her own marriage together, Paul (Corey Stoll) and his wife struggling to conceive and stoner skirt-chaser Phillip (Adam Driver) refusing to grow up.

Nothing too much happens with the plot and there is perhaps not enough at stake to make This is Where I Leave You anything more than a couple of hours spent with an amusing Jewish clan and their horny, smart-mouthed mum, rounded out by some tearful psychological breakthroughs.

Where the film is at its best is when the four Altmans are sitting around shooting the breeze, remembering their father, reconnecting with their pasts and generally rubbing each other up the wrong way.

"I have to go have sex," announces wannabe father Paul after one such boozy bull session in a bar. "In some cultures people enjoy sex," quips Wendy, with Fey putting her sweet-faced irony to better use than in any of the several movies she's made in the wake of 30 Rock.

Indeed, the core players are all a hoot, with the red-hot Driver (the lanky Lothario from the Lena Dunham series Girls as well as Inside Llewyn Davis and Tracks) perfect as the womanising younger brother, Bateman at his droll, sad-sack best and the ageless Fonda bringing sexy back without it being cringe-inducing.

This is Where I Leave You opens today.