My, how things change!

The unwilling Vanity Fair cover girl and tabloid culture's summer star is to appear in the new play Dead Accounts, which just announced its full cast. Ms. Holmes has surrounded herself with a coterie of respected performers significantly less renowned for non-artistic endeavors. The male lead is Norbert Leo Butz, a two-time Tony-winner; the other stars are prolific character actress Judy Greer, Coast of Utopia star Josh Hamilton, and Tony nominee Jayne Houdyshell, who just appeared in Broadway's Follies.

It seems that Ms. Holmes is interested in reinventing herself as a real Broadway actress--that All My Sons, with its all-movie-star cast and classic script, was a significantly  safer bet than Dead Accounts. Since the newly divorced, newly intriguing actress is sure to sell tickets on her own merits, choosing a new play with less famous performers is a good way to use her fame for good--all while ensuring she'll be the one in the spotlight throughout.

Jason Segel and Ed Helms in 'Jeff Who Lives At Home'

"You and I can get started and Jay will join us,” Mark Duplass told The Observer, so we began the interview. “You’ll realize we share the same brain anyway.”

The Louisiana-born Messrs. Duplass, who now live in Los Angeles, direct films together; they are perhaps the most prominent Americans who fit that description since Joel and Ethan Coen. With the Coens, the Duplasses share a finely honed quirkiness and an ability to create worlds that seem hermetically sealed. Their first feature, 2005’s The Puffy Chair, has a glacial pace—very little happens as a pair of brothers (one played by Mark) go to pick up an upholstered armchair for their father. There is little dialogue, and yet comedy and unexpectedly moving drama are wrung out of long silences and stares and the sense of a rich, unelaborated history. The film’s presence at the 2005 South by Southwest festival alongside similarly inexpensive, slackerish works heralded the arrival of the “mumblecore” genre.

The pair’s new film, Jeff Who Lives at Home, released March 16, lacks some of The Puffy Chair’s mumbliness. It’s less willing, if slightly, to force the viewer to connect dots independently; there’s a bit more exposition. But it continues where The Puffy Chair left off, telling the story of two brothers, Pat, a workaday fellow (played by Ed Helms), and Jeff, a vaguely mystic stoner (Jason Segel), and creating from the brothers’ relationship a diegetic world that seems two or three degrees removed from our own. The story is a picaresque of sorts, piling incident upon incident over the course of the birthday of their mother (Susan Sarandon). Filial piety—or lack thereof—is an important theme.

The most significant difference between Jeff Who Lives at Home and The Puffy Chair—the difference from which all the other differences stem—is in its provenance. The Duplass brothers’ newest film comes with the support of Paramount, through the studio’s Vantage shingle. It follows on their commercial breakthrough film, 2010’s Cyrus, which Fox Searchlight produced for a reported $7 million, making a small profit on its nearly $10 million worldwide gross. This may seem like small potatoes, but few of their cohort get the distribution the Duplass brothers do, or can woo stars like Mr. Helms, Mr. Segel, and Ms. Sarandon or, for Cyrus, Marisa Tomei and Jonah Hill.

“Cyrus is the first movie we did that had money and name stars, and we were scared as shit,” said Mark, at 35 the younger of the two—Jay is 38—and the one who acts in projects as disparate as The Puffy Chair and FX’s fantasy-sports comedy The League. “We were scared, a) that we wouldn’t do a good job with it, and b) that the studio system and the whole crew and all the voices were gonna fuck up our movie. We were so scared that we almost overprepared ourselves for how different it was going to be.”

The major difference in working with a studio for the first time, said Mark, was the degree to which the pair needed to loop people in on a process that for them had always been unspoken. The exposition in The Puffy Chair isn’t the only thing the pair leave unsaid. “That nonverbal, brother communication that Jay and I used [to] barrel through those early, fiercely independent films like The Puffy Chair—that stuff needed to be verbal and be expressed to 100 people. In order to do that you can start to kill the magic of the movie. That’s something we’re starting to learn.”

Jay described the set of Jeff Who Lives at Home as a battle to retain the brothers’ autonomy amid a flurry of studio notes: “If you’re talking about throw pillows for thirty minutes, you’re not talking about something else,” he said. “Time is limited. You’re fighting for sleep, you’re trying to keep your eye on the ball.” Mark jumped in. “When the scenes aren’t working, we have to say, ‘Everybody’s going to hate us but we have to walk around the block and rewrite this scene and reconfigure this scene.’ And that’s easy to do when it’s eight of your friends as the crew, but it’s harder to do when the studio wants you to complete your day and all the crew members want to go home and complete their day, and you just have to make really sure you don’t get too into people-pleasing.”

Mark continued: “And you have to focus on the fact that ultimately, when it comes out, they’ll be happy.” Ms. Sarandon agreed to star in the film after the Duplasses reached out to her. “It was very pleasant,” she told The Observer. “They completely flattered me, and I responded to that.” The brothers, she said, are collaborative and trusting. “They talk to you—we didn’t really have major rehearsal for sure, but we talked about it, and if you have something you want changed, you’d talk to them a couple days before.

“We kind of figured out the blocking together,” she said. “They use two cameras and Jay operates one, and once you get what you’ve agreed upon, they just tell you to start improvising.”

Judy Greer, the actress who plays Pat’s wife and who has one of the trickiest scenes in the film—a fight born of a seething unhappiness—found the directors’ willingness to allow her to improvise generous. “It was one of the most collaborative experiences I’ve ever had—and yet they were extremely decisive. They gave you freedom to do what you wanted to do, but they were very clear. It didn’t feel like a free-for-all.” “They want to make a movie with cool, fun, nice, respectful people,” said Ms. Greer, “like when they made movies with their best friends. They liked that vibe.” Ms. Greer said that while shooting—during which she was commuting from Jeff’s New Orleans set to Hawaii, where she was filming The Descendants—she didn’t see the brothers much off-set. “Mark and Jay were in town with their families, staying at their parents’ house.”

“It’s common for siblings to have that weird, Siamese sense of humor, where they get stuff no one else gets,” said Mark. “You look at your parents as museum curators on some level. You are both taking in the same content, same movies, making the same family jokes—you’re curated in the same household.” The pair watched HBO as grade schoolers: “At 10 on any given Sunday morning, I’m 5 and Jay’s 8 and we’re watching Kramer vs. Kramer. We kind of for whatever reason watched these adult dramas that got us focused on relationships at an early age.”

And yet the pair’s films focus on brothers who are very different from one another—there’s at first little sense in Jeff Who Lives at Home that the loopy Jeff and the staid Pat can have come from the same curators. Said Mark: “It’s not easy to pinpoint [that] one of us is Jeff and one of us is Pat, but Jay and I have both of [the character’s] in our personalities. Our parents are very different people, and they created a personal conflict in me and Jay—in our DNA, there’s a guy like Pat who’s trying to put his head down and get through life without thinking about it too much, because if you think about it too much, you might just start crying, and there’s a guy like Jeff in us who wants to take things slow and believes there’s a greater spiritual force out there guiding us.

“But they’re both indicative of Jay’s and my questions about happiness, and how difficult it is to be happy. I don’t know why that is.”

It would seem as though the brothers have little to be unhappy about—they’ve made it to the big time without sacrificing their style. The studio backing has made them the world’s ambassadors of mumblecore. But they don’t believe in the genre’s existence.

“Mark and I were just making movies,” said Jay. “Like, we were just coming out of a cave and making movies. It was nice in 2005 when you’re making a $15,000 movie and  The New York Times writes it up and you’re the creator of a movement—but we didn’t create anything other than a movie.”

The quest for happiness continues, then, as the Duplasses seek to define who they are with more movies rather than by digging into genre. “There’s never going to be one ideal set,” said Mark. “It’s going to be looking at a group of years and a group of movies and making sure we do lots of things, because the grass-is-greener mentality always sets in. When we were doing The Puffy Chair, we were like, ‘God, we need more resources,’ and then when we were making Jeff Who Lives at Home and we were like, ‘God, we wish we were doing what we did on The Puffy Chair.’” These days the brothers are developing two projects, Mark said, “one of which is me and Jay and a huge movie star and a crew of about four people. And one of which is a 100-person crew and a bigger-budget movie.”

Ry Russo-Young, a filmmaker who acted with Mark in 2007 in director Joe Swanberg’s seminal mumblecore film Hannah Takes the Stairs, has faith in the Duplasses’ abilities. “Mark is really funny as a dude and he has a confidence that makes you at ease in a sense and a playfulness that makes the world seem like a jungle gym and you want to play on it. He’s so relaxed!” She recalled getting ice cream with Mark and the rest of the cast, who lived together in a Chicago house during filming. Was it possible, we asked her, for a so-called  mumblecore director simply to make the films he or she wanted to make, without getting stigmatized by genre? “I want to think it’s possible!” she said.

In dismissing the mumblecore label, Mark said he and Jay are just making movies they’d want to watch. “We’re trying to make something that gets us off—makes us giggle, makes us laugh, makes us cry.”

After stints in Austin and Brooklyn, Los Angeles is a big change. “For me, it is hard to be in a town where you’re constantly—when you go to your kid’s friend’s birthday party, it’s an industry event,” said Mark. “I’m gardening, right now, when I’m talking to you guys. If you just let L.A. have its way with you but you cultivate your experience, it can be amazing.”

Said Jay: “We realize we have it made and we get to do what we love to do, but it never ends. We wake up in the morning and ask, ‘Are we doing what we’re supposed to do?’ It’s the same as it always was. It’s a little less angsty because we have some money now, so that takes a little pressure off.”

The Descendents.

The Descendants is a soap opera with Hawaiian shirts. It’s worth seeing for the sharp but uneven human observations in the script and direction by Alexander Payne (Sideways), and sometimes it’s fun (but mostly exasperating) watching George Clooney trying to act as he struggles through the role of a man trying to raise two needy daughters while grieving over the loss of his wife in a boating accident. Clichés ensue. Clooney fans may be pleased to see their hero in a sentimental tearjerker, but the fawning and gushing of so many astute critics who have greeted this plodding melodrama with raves on the film-festival circuit mystifies me. The Descendants has moments, and I give it high marks for making literal sense at a time when few movies do, but it isn’t original or revealing enough to merit a running time of just under two hours. To me, it doesn’t come close to this year’s other George Clooney potboiler, The Ides of March.

As Matt King, the descendant of a royal Hawaiian princess (huh?), the star controls a plot of 25,000 acres of priceless virgin territory in Kauai that everyone urges him to sell to greedy developers for more money than Dole has pineapples. It’s a bad time for a work-obsessed entrepreneur under pressure. While he’s playing real estate lawyer and sorting out his differences with relatives (headed by Beau Bridges) to keep the land pristine and save Paradise, he also has to grapple with the decision to pull the plug on his brain-dead wife, Liz, who has been lying in the hospital in a coma for 23 days. Suddenly the backdrop of swaying palms and cobalt skies seems like a cruel irony to this island native who spends all of his time in shorts and banana-leaf T-shirts. “Paradise can go fuck itself,” he says in the opening voiceover. He’s mad with good cause. He’s also terrified of being left alone to raise 10-year-old Scottie (Amara Miller) and 17-year-old Alexandra (Shailene Woodley), the cynical daughters he has never taken the time to know. Grief morphs into real rage when Alexandra, home from boarding school with ascerbic put-downs and attitude, drops the bomb that their perfect mom also had a lover on the side Matt didn’t even know about and was planning to divorce him. Matt is understandably confused, and the three women in his life are a mess. Cynical Alexandra is into drugs and older men. Scottie cusses and emails her friends about sex. Liz, he discovers, was a secret party girl into motorcycles, speedboats and heavy drinking. “She doesn’t want us sitting around watching her spoil like milk,” he grumps, but when her condition turns terminal, one contrivance after another piles up like a stack of toothpicks, as Pop and the girls deal with a scrappy grandpa (Robert Forster), a grandmother with Alzheimer’s, the wife’s married lover (Matthew Lillard) and the lover’s own unsuspecting wife (Judy Greer). Along for the ride is Alexandra’s rude, insensitive, politically clueless, surf-dude boyfriend, Sid (Nick Krause). The movie is about the ways a reluctant schlump with no parenting skills and a pathetic view of the human race is forced to re-evaluate his mistakes, count his losses and wake up before it’s too late to smell the bougainvilla.

I wish I could say I enjoyed this corn more than I did. Snowy haired and brown as burned butter, Mr. Clooney looks great barefoot and topless, and it’s nice to see him play warmth as well as wit. He rarely has the chance to take on a role that requires something more than enigmatic winks and smug grins, and as his hair grays and his lines deepen, his trademark charm seems more genuine. But I found the film’s moments of pathos every bit as unconvincing as the bigger picture of a man who learns late-life redemption through guilt, and I found Mr. Clooney’s tears and sentimentality especially clumsy. It’s hard to fault him because he works so hard to distance himself from his usual two-fisted fictions, but he fails to engineer a consistently mature characterization from start to finish. He seems to be more concerned with having a good time on a Hawaiian holiday. An attempt is made to capture a truthful crumbling of manly composure about what is happening in his wasted life, but during his big crying scene on a bridge, the camera is on his back. It’s as though Mr. Payne didn’t feel he was entirely up to the emotional demands in the closeups. In other places, the literary roots (a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings) show. It’s not a great adaptation. (The movie claims to do for Hawaii what Sideways did for the vineyards of California’s Santa Ynez Valley, but don’t believe it. South Pacific, The Hawaiians and the Esther Williams musical Pagan Love Song did a great deal more to put Hawaii on the map.)

Sometimes the screenplay works. At other times, Mr. Payne’s awkward dialogue (co-written with Nat Faxon and Jim Rash) only provokes laughter in the wrong places. In the pivotal moment where Mr. Clooney disconnects the tubes on Liz’s life-support system, the tense emotional pull in the scene is interrupted by the arrival of “the other woman,” distraughtly sobbing, “I forgive you for trying to destroy my family!” The scene is so embarrassing that the impact is strangely hilarious. For the most part, I liked George Clooney as a complacent, one-dimensional corporate beach bum who discovers the value of family love and gets roughed emotionally. But the movie does not always support his good intentions. The result is a slighter, airier piece of prime-time soap opera fluff (think Falcon Crest, Dallas and Knot’s Landing) than director Payne seems to have intended.

rreed@observer.com

THE DESCENDANTS

Running Time 115 minutes

Written by Alexander Payne and Nat Faxon

Directed by Alexander Payne

Starring George Clooney, Judy Greer and Matthew Lillard

2.5/4

We found ourselves kinda stunned by what happened on television last night. No, not that Republican congressman Joe Wilson heckled the president of the United States during his address to the joint session on Congress—seriously? “You lie?” This isn’t a town hall meeting in South Carolina, buddy!—but that we really found ourselves falling in love with Glee. If you would have told us in May that we’d be legitimately excited to see where this series goes over the course of season one, we’re not sure we would have believed you. Perhaps the use of Don’t Stop Believin’ at the end of the pilot was more prescient than it first appeared.

As we wrote back then, despite possessing a plethora of excellent moving parts—the premise, the cast—the pilot episode of Glee was choppy, derivative and forced: too much like an Alexander Payne movie and too much like the long-forgotten—though not by us!—Miss Guided with Judy Greer but with too much preciousness to be sustainable beyond the pilot. However, in the first episode of the season, everything was on-point and focused, a complete turnaround from before. The situations and, most importantly, the characters, were given a chance to breath and exist. In the pilot, creator Ryan Murphy didn’t just hijack Mr. Payne’s Middle American palette, but also his utter contempt for the characters he created. The students and teachers on Glee didn’t seem like human beings as much as they seemed like vessels to make jokes at their expense. Now, though, they’re more than just punch lines and excuses for choreographed dances; they’re human beings that people can empathize with. The derisive Payne sense of humor has been replaced by something more akin to 30 Rock: You’re laughing with them and not at them.

That Mr. Murphy also gets an epic performance out of Jane Lynch doesn’t hurt either. Ms. Lynch has long been one of the most talented comedic actresses working in Hollywood—we still think she could have gotten an Oscar nomination for Role Models—but on Glee she takes things to another level. Simply, she’s a riot on the show; Ms. Lynch’s screen-time-to-laugh-line ratio almost breaks down to 1-to-1. We can barely even think of something she said that wasn’t funny—our favorite: “That was the most offensive thing I’ve seen in twenty years of teaching, and that includes an elementary school production of Hair.”

We guess our now-love of Glee can be easily summed up with what teacher Will Schuster (Matthew Morrison) relayed to one of his students about glee club during the episode: “It was cool, we had fun and that is what glee is supposed to be about.” Glee isn’t about to replace oxygen, but it’s quite possibly the most fun we’ve had watching television in months. And, really, what’s wrong with that?

Need a movie to keep you company until you literally can't keep your eyes open? Join us tonight when we pass out to 13 Going on 30 [starting @ 10 p.m. on FX]

Why we’ll try to stay up and watch it: Memo to all aspiring Hollywood screenwriters: You can never underestimate the importance of your ending. Simple advice, to be sure, but we find it hard to believe how often it's ignored. Take No Country for Old Men. The Coen brothers' Academy Award winning film is a near perfect thriller packed with great performances, set pieces and smart dialogue. But, ask anyone their opinion of it, and chances are the first thing they say is something disparaging about the ending. (This is true—try it yourself!) And no matter how great your script is, if you whiff on the finale, none of it will matter.

We bring up this seemingly obvious axiom because 13 Going on 30 is the No Country of Old Men of romantic comedies. A distaff version of Big (and the likely precursor of Samantha Who?), the film is a brightly colored confection of contagious fun that just so happens to be filled with a ton of positive girl power messages … until an ending that, as our friend so eloquently put it, causes suicidal tendencies. We won’t spoil it, but a white picket fence is involved. Suffice it to say that if you’re a woman who thought they could have both a career and a marriage, 13 Going on 30 begs to differ.

This is unfortunate because until the final five minutes, there are a million and one reasons why 13 Going on 30 is one of the cutest and most assured romantic comedies to come along in the last decade. Chief among them is Jennifer Garner. Mrs. Ben Affleck is warm, funny, charming and as believable as she can be while playing a 13-year-old trapped in the body of a 30-year-old; this is her Julia Roberts moment, and she doesn’t drop the ball. (Though that she’s now relegated to starring alongside the likes of Matthew McConaughey in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past is a bit alarming; has her career gotten to the point where she’s the actress you cast when Kate Hudson is busy?) It’s just that no matter how great Ms. Garner is—and how much fantastic support she has from Judy Greer and Mark Ruffalo—nothing can save the bitter taste you’ll have by the time the credits roll.

When we’ll probably fall asleep: Ah, but the great thing about watching 13 Going on 30 on cable is that you never have to actually make it to the ending. You can punch out long before and pretend that the movie ends the way you’d like—we do this same trick with No Country for Old Men, always turning it off after Javier Bardem walks away from his vicious car accident. So we’ll call it an early night and stay with 13 Going on 30 until 10:45 p.m., 45 minutes into the film, when Ms. Garner’s Jenna saves a dying party by starting a spontaneous (but perfectly choreographed) group dance-along to “Thriller.” If you don’t start goofily smiling during this scene, chances are you died five minutes ago.

Does anyone remember laughter? O.K. maybe times haven’t been that tough, but the country’s diaphragms have been woefully underused these last couple of months (even with Jimmy Kimmel f**king Ben Affleck) with the absence of new episodes of veteran sitcoms (and movies like Semi-Pro plaguing the theaters). But tonight, all of that changes with fresh installments of How I Met Your Mother (CBS, 8:30 p.m.) and Two and a Half Men (CBS, 9 p.m.). (Rookie breakout The Big Bang Theory (CBS, 8 p.m.) has a new episode, too!) Watch—it’s bound to feel like the television equivalent of make-up sex.

The evening is rife with unintentional comedy, too. And I’m not just talking about New Amsterdam (Fox, 9 p.m.). I kid. (You couldn’t pay me to watch that show!) Both Dancing With the Stars (ABC, 8 p.m.) and The Bachelor (ABC, 9 p.m.) return. The producers of Stars have outdone themselves this season by corralling Steve Guttenberg. It’s good to know he’s still alive. He’ll be competing against the Dolphins’ Jason Taylor, Penn Jillette, and Adam Carolla, amongst others (but who cares about them?). Is there a winner in the bunch? Trick question!

Bonus: it’s the season finale of Medium (NBC, 10 p.m.) and an opportunity, perchance, to continue one’s streak of never … watching … Medium—even if Patricia Arquette is a snaggle-tooth beauty.

TUESDAY

The funny continues? Well, ABC would like to think so as it unveils sitcom Miss/Guided (10:30 p.m.). Dumping it that late may not instill a lot of confidence, but they make up for it by stacking the deck Thursday, putting back-to-back episodes of it as Lost’s lead-in. The show stars Judy Greer—fun fact: she played George Bluth’s secretary and mistress on Arrested Development—as a woman who returns to her high school alma mater as a guidance counselor. Incidentally, it’s a single camera comedy like AD. She must be hoping it lasts a bit longer, no?

There’s probably little overlap between fans of Project Runway and college basketball. But for those unfortunate souls stuck in the center of that Venn diagram, tonight may pose a small problem. Yes, I’m aware that the season of Project Runway is over. But that doesn’t keep Tim Gunn from spreading his fashion sense throughout the NBC Universal kingdom, as is his wont. Tonight, he appears on The Biggest Loser (8 p.m.) at about the same time as the opening night game of the NCAA tournament (ESPN, 7:30 p.m.) gets going. This is obviously what they invented DVR for. (Meanwhile, if your Project Runway jones is still not satisfied, the fierce and fabulous Christian Siriano will be on Make Me a Supermodel (Bravo, 10 p.m.) on Thursday. That’s so tranny!)

Bonus: The Truth Behind Sitcom Scandals (Bio, 10 p.m.) serves up the dish on The Love Boat and M.A.S.H. As if we didn’t have enough scandals to keep track of …

WEDNESDAY

Thinking about getting married? Well, you might want to stay away from 20/20 on WE’s three-part series on marriage. First, they’re going to examine “dangerous marital secrets,” like the one which played a hand in a doctor’s wife being murdered on Valentine’s Day. (From “I do” to “I did it”!) It’s the perfect segue into the second part, suspicious deaths within marriages. It is not clear what the third part is about, but it’ll probably involve prostitutes—you know, just to be timely.

Elsewhere, American Idol (Fox, 9 p.m.) and Moment of Truth (Fox, 8 p.m.) continue their dominance.

THURSDAY

Last week’s episode of Lost (ABC, 9 p.m.) posted the show’s lowest ratings of the season. Perhaps it had something to do with it being the third heart-rending episode in a row. Or perhaps people just don’t like to read subtitles. Whatever the case, can we get a good old-fashioned phantom-rocking-chair-in-a-deserted -cabin episode real soon? I miss Jacob.

Straight from the WTF file: ten wannabe child stars compete for the chance to be trained by Danny Bonaduce on I Know My Child’s a Star (VH1, 10 p.m.). Being Bonaduce seemed hard enough for the former child star, now he’s going to teach others how to do it? Oh, man. Do these parents want their kids to go to rehab before they’re bar-mitzvahed?

FRIDAY

James Van Der Beek is on Free Radio (VH1, 9:30 p.m.), the improvised comedy sitcom starring Lance Krall, as the intern of a popular radio show who’s called in to replace its host when he leaves for satellite radio. His shtick is to ineptly interview celebrities. Let’s hope this leads to better things for James, who hasn’t been the same since he left Dawson’s Creek. Maybe he should have married Tom Cruise?

SUNDAY

Oprah’s Big Give (ABC, 9 p.m.) does its best to mimic Brewster’s Millions, when it gives contestants a day to give away hundreds of thousands of dollars. Bear Sterns were brought in as consultants.