Duplass, who zooms his camera.

In the Duplass brothers' Jeff, Who Lives at Home, Jeff (Jason Segel), who--more accurately--lives in his mother's basement, is presented as your typical slacker. Or at least your typical movie slacker. He's a couch potato, he loves his bong, and a pair of shorts and a hoodie is his sartorial preference. He also believes in signs. Or should I say he believes in Signs, the 2002 movie starring Mel Gibson. The M. Night Shymalan film gets Jeff thinking. Thinking that everything happens for a reason. That something great is his destiny. That everything is connected. That the wrong-number phone call he gets in the basement for somebody named Kevin is a sign that he must follow the first "Kevin" he sees into a bad neighborhood and play a pick-up basketball game with him.

If Jeff is content in believing the greatness of things to come, everyone else around him is too busy struggling with the mundanity of their real lives. His brother, Pat (Ed Helms) is nominally the successful one of the two siblings, but his marriage to Linda (Judy Greer, always a welcome sight in a movie) is falling apart. In typical mid-life crisis fashion, he just bought a Porsche (driving gloves included, of course). Their mother, Sharon (Susan Sarandon) works a boring office job, has been lonely ever since the death of her husband almost two decades ago, and has to yell and scream just to get Jeff to leave the house to run an errand.

This isn't new territory for Segel. He's the earnest and silly goof we've seen in any number of roles. But even with that (over-)familiarity, it still works for a couple of main reasons I think. One, Segel is still quite funny, especially so giving-and-taking with Helms. Two, and most importantly, except for when we first see him, Jeff isn't actually slacking. The movie smartly gives Jeff two projects: to explore the "signs" he's been getting (basically, following anything that's named Kevin) and help Pat find out if Linda is cheating on him.

Helms himself plays slightly against type. He's often not unlike Segel in a lot of ways. But here he's not the sweet, lovable, often naive guy we're used to seeing in things like The Hangover, Cedar Rapids, or on "The Office". Pat is more smarmy (the goatee seems to be enough of an indicator) and a completely inattentive husband. He's a marginally successful business man, but he lives in a crappy apartment and spends his money on that new Porsche. He's quite regularly a dick to his brother and his mother.

But assholes have hearts too and it's a trait in favor of this movie that each character, in truth, are plainly just good people. When Pat realizes he may be losing Linda, it terrifies him and becomes a significant part of story's arc. Even Linda's potential drift into infidelity isn't a sign of malice or anger, but of sadness and loneliness--of her wanting to feel like she matters to someone. Though Sharon is first seen yelling at Jeff over the phone, she's not a domineering mother. She's just trying to figure everything out just like everybody else. (The secondary narrative regarding her colleague/friend, Carol (Rae Dawn Chong) could've been cloying, but turns out to be quite sweet.) And Jeff's initial lack of ambition isn't necessarily due to laziness, but a misguided (or not) game of waiting for destiny to appear.

I guess I've front-loaded this review with positives to give you the impression that I liked it. Which I certainly do. But there is something about it which I also find utterly annoying. Jeff, Who Lives at Home is the fourth movie from the Duplass brothers, the directing duo that made their mark in the independent scene and film festival circuit before branching out into slightly bigger, more mainstream films. In many ways it's reminiscent of their first movie, The Puffy Chair, about two bickering brothers who hit the road to acquire a birthday present for their father. But the visual style most resembles their last film, Cyrus, their first movie with a larger budget and movie stars (John C. Reilly, Jonah Hill, and Marisa Tomei).

And that visual style is the fully irksome overuse of the jittery camera. So often in this film--as in their previous--the picture moves and reframes as if a static camera wouldn't be enough to show a person simply speaking. Even more annoying are the completely unmotivated zooms (both in and out) as if we're being clued in to thinking something of importance is about to be said or done, when in reality none of that is occurring.

It is certainly not my belief that an unsteady, constantly probing camera style can't be a valid aesthetic approach. But here, as in Cyrus, those visual ticks are employed indiscriminately, making the film feel too addled. In a couple of interviews (here and here), the brothers have asserted that the reason for their loose visual approach has to do with spontaneity, as if they could presumably zoom into a character's face at some random moment of actor brilliance. There is a sequence late in the film where Jeff and Pat are sitting in the back of a taxi riding across a bridge. It's a nice moment, one of quiet calm before the climax that is soon to follow. But instead of simply looking at each of them in their moments of reflection, the camera jerks and zooms. Again, it adds nothing, except take the viewer out of the movie. It's a (camera) effect with no cause. And vice versa.

Sometimes you see young independent directors use narrative or visual gimmickry to make their films stand out. In a cluttered market, it's a way for them to make their name, so to speak. It feels though as if the Duplasses are reasserting their independence from Hollywood despite their branching out into bigger studio movies with bigger names. Perhaps it's their way of saying, "Hey, look, we're still gritty and realistic and not Hollywood.

Despite that pretty glaring flaw, the film is built upon the charm of Segel and his rapport with Helms. It's about seeing what's staring you in the face and deciding what it all means. It's about the weakening tether of family as you age. It's about following a "Kevin Kandy" truck because Mel Gibson told you to.