This Is Where I Leave You

On this day, relieved of the requirement to sit shiva, the family moves around and renegotiates relationships in different ways. Movement, connection, and fracture are the major currents of these scenes. Judd takes the vantage of an observer as he sits upon the roof—a way to draw apart and contemplate things with a bit of distance—but he admits that this perspective does not lend him any omniscience. Judd’s lack of judgment as he watches Wendy return from visiting Horry, and Linda returning home after spending the night at the Foxman house, highlights Sex and Love as Life-Affirming Needs. Judd accepts that there are things he simply doesn’t know about the people he’s surrounded with, but what he doesn’t know has less to do with personalities and motives than with the mystery of what attracts one person to another and why that attraction changes.

He confronts this puzzle in several forms over the course of the day. Alice’s desire, while in her eyes quite practical, is selfish, and her taking advantage of Judd is a violation, as he does not consent. Alice’s sex outside marriage is a mirror and parallel of Jen’s betrayal. However, Judd does not push Alice away or threaten to tell Paul, perhaps because he still cares for Alice, because he cares for Paul’s feelings, or because having sex with a forbidden woman is, for Judd, a kind of wish fulfillment. He engages in other fantasies of love, sex, and connection with the women he sees on the way to the hotel to meet Jen.

Jen in reality is a cold contrast to these warm fantasies, and Judd must confront, for the first time, that he might have substantially contributed to the emotional distance that grew between them, whereas before he cast himself as the one betrayed. His growing understanding and empathy hint that Healing Betrayal Through Forgiveness is on his mind. Jen’s grief over the baby they lost touches on Judd’s own grief for what he has lost, which includes the baby, Jen, and now his father. Driving to the house they shared in their marriage is a way Judd attempts to retrace these steps to go backward in time. He understands that the child was not the sole reason for their distance but added to the growing fracture. He also understands Jen’s grief.

There is shock but not surprise when Judd realizes Wade has intruded into their bedroom, beginning to take Judd’s place in Jen’s life. His unstitching of Wade’s pants is meant to humiliate Wade, exposing his sexual organs in a way that could accuse Wade of being all libido and no emotional substance. Judd has no compunction about stealing money from Wade because of what he feels Wade stole from him. The picture Judd takes from the house—the memory he seeks to reclaim—is not of Jen on the vacation they took while grieving their child, but of their honeymoon, that first flush of innocence when he believed she belonged to and was devoted to him. It is this feeling that Judd wishes he could recapture.

Given that he is still trapped in the past, Judd feels unable to engage with his family in the present and so avoids the family picnic, where the others seem to be getting along. Instead, he seeks out Penny, as if this were a way he could reconnect with and soothe a younger, hurt self. The sex is awkward, though Judd tries to congratulate himself that at least he is having sex. In neither case has intercourse brought Judd the kind of emotional connection he seeks.

While he fails to connect with Jen, or Alice, or Penny, Judd takes a step toward reconciliation with his brothers as the three of them sit in the school classroom—a call back to their childhood—and share a joint. The marijuana is their father’s, likely for medicinal use, and provides another way Mort brings the men together. Judd feels awkward in his father’s suit, as he is struggling with what the maturity of adulthood, and impending fatherhood, means. However, in the joint, and in the photo Phillip shows him of their father watching the boys play, Judd is reminded of his father’s place in and ongoing presence in his life. This makes him capable of a step toward real human connection and practice at nurturing when he holds his baby niece and lets her fall asleep on his chest. Serena is being denied solace because her parents think she needs to learn to self-soothe, but Judd wants his niece—and his own child—to grow up feeling loved, supported, and secure.