Good mourning!
Sibling rivalries return and old flames are rekindled when the kids come home to remember Papa in fun farce
J UST in time for Rosh Hashanah, here comes the sex farce “This Is Where I Leave You,’’ roughly a Jewish variation on “August: Osage County’’ that may not live up to its stellar cast any more than the earlier film — but is a whole lot funnier.
Not that any of the wildly dysfunctional Altmans in Jonathan Tropper’s door-slamming adaptation of his own novel are all that observant.
In fact, it’s WASP matriarch Hillary (a terrific Jane Fonda) who orders her grown kids to sit shiva seven days for their Jewish atheist dad, while Hillary’s “sitting in the same spot where we put the Christmas tree,’’ as one of her children acidly observes.
Hillary, a child psychologist with a new boob job, has been the queen of oversharing since her older offspring were teens (and she wrote an embarrassing best-selling book about them).
So it’s no surprise that when the siblings aren’t fighting about money, they’re loudly discussing each other’s sex lives — or eagerly eavesdropping on lovemaking sessions via a baby monitor.
Jason Bateman has the largest role as middle son Judd, a depressed radio producer who recently caught his wife (Abigail Spencer) in the act with his shock-jock boss (Dax Shepard).
Returning home to Westchester for the week, Judd finds a quite willing new sex partner in his high school sweetheart, an ice skating instructor (Rose Byrne) who’s a not-quite-manic pixie dream girl.
Fey plays sarcastic, bossy daughter Wendy, whose own husband has recently bailed.
When not hurling barbed insults at everyone in sight, she wistfully eyes an exboyfriend (Timothy Olyphant) brain-damaged from a long- ago automobile accident from which she emerged unscathed.
Long-suffering older brother Paul (Corey Stoll) runs the family hardware store, when he’s not trying to impregnate his wife (Kathryn Hahn) — so desperate for a child that she isn’t above trying to jump brother-in-law Judd, who was her boyfriend before she hooked up with Paul.
Adam Driver is particularly funny as Phillip, the youngster of the family — a babbling stoner who arrives with his bemused shrink-turned-lover (Connie Britton, who manages to walk off with the movie), who’s twice his age, in tow.
And then there’s the wacky rabbi (Ben Schwartz), who we’re constantly reminded was nicknamed “Boner’’ as a child — and who discovers the Altman boys toking up in the Hebrew-school classroom during their dad’s services.
If this sounds like a contrived setup, it definitely is — but director Shawn Levy (whose rap sheet includes “Night at the Museum’’ and other horrors) consistently lets his starry cast bring the funny while maintaining a far brisker pace than any of the overpraised, R-rated comedies from the Judd Apatow atelier. And the Jewish characters are less stereotyped than you’d think.
“This Is Where I Leave You’’ is the rare film that improves as it goes along, even gaining some emotional traction as one character reveals a surprise pregnancy and, yes, another comes out of the closet to the astonished family.
This lily-white farce is not quite Oscar-caliber material, but oy — you could do far, far worse for a night at the multiplex these days.