“Edgy” indie comedy by the brothers Jay and Mark Duplass (“mumblecore” movers and shakers, makers of Baghead among others), the premise of which would be just as easy to imagine as a mainstream Will Ferrell vehicle: an oafish divorced lonelyheart (“I’m like Shrek”) thinks he may have found a new woman, only to find she shares her house with a portly territorial twenty-one-year-old son, milking his “night terrors” for all they are worth. The writing is nowhere as slick and glib as it would have had to be in the mainstream, going more for awkwardness and discomfort than for mirth. But it’s hard to credit any tactical ingenuity, any strategic subtlety, to a film whose opening scene has the hero’s ex-wife walk in on him masturbating in the bedroom, and whose idea of a meet-cute is to have him approached at a party while taking a whiz in the bushes: “Nice penis.” And the shaky hand-held camera and the jerky lurching zooms seem calculated to curb any willingness to laugh. They take the edge off the sharpness of observation, if not the edge off the “edginess.” Through it all, John C. Reilly and Marisa Tomei remain sympathetic, or perhaps no more than pitiable, and Jonah Hill at last earns some respect for trying to be more than just, on behalf of young tubbies, Someone To Identify With. Catherine Keener, Matt Walsh. (2010) — Duncan Shepherd
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