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Jonathan Tropper’s ‘This is Where I Leave You’ finds humor during shivah

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September 18, 2014

In the film “This Is Where I Leave You,” Judd Altman (Jason Bateman) walks in on his wife having voracious sex with his boss, a Howard Stern-style shock jock, and soon finds himself out of a job, a marriage and a home.

Then his father dies, but not before leaving a startling last request for Judd and the rest of his dysfunctional clan: The entire mishpachah should camp out at the family home and sit shivah for seven days. 

“But Dad is an atheist,” one of Judd’s siblings complains. “A Jewish atheist,” corrects another.

And so the bickering Altmans come together, both clashing and bonding as they reluctantly carry out their patriarch’s final wish: Judd, his brother Paul (Corey Stoll), who resents that he had to shoulder the family business while his siblings escaped the suburbs; Judd’s sister, Wendy (Tina Fey), the tart-tongued and miserable wife of a workaholic hedge fund manager; Philip (Adam Driver), the family screw-up who, as the youngest child, has been pampered his whole life; and the family matriarch, Hilary (Jane Fonda), an over-sharing, stiletto-wearing pop psychologist who has written a best-selling parenting book that reveals all too many embarrassing anecdotes about her children.

Trying to shepherd the Altmans through the Jewish mourning ritual is Rabbi Grodner (Ben Schwartz), the siblings’ childhood friend, nicknamed “Boner” because of his high-school obsession with the female anatomy. Grodner is soon exasperated by the family’s reluctance to cover their mirrors or to sit on low chairs as is customary during shivah. The rabbi is, moreover, aghast when Judd, having discovered medical marijuana joints in one of his father’s old suits, coaxes his brothers into ditching the Kaddish to get high in the synagogue’s religious school during the funeral.

“It’s like their dad gave them one last treat on his way out,” said Jonathan Tropper, who adapted his 2009 novel of the same name to write the film’s screenplay.

“I was trying to figure out what was the most inappropriate, escapist thing these people, who have no desire to be in temple, could do,” he said of the pot sequence by phone from his New Rochelle, N.Y., home. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve been in temple many times wishing somebody would invite me outside for a little recreation. And I also thought this would be a good way for the brothers to connect.”

Still, Tropper — who was raised in a liberal observant home in Riverdale, N.Y., and now sends his children to a Modern Orthodox day school — insists he never intended his irreverent story to mock Judaism. He said he was “very careful” to spell out that the family ultimately finds some solace in the Jewish mourning ritual.

“And I also wanted to make sure that even though shivah was the setting, the story’s appeal went beyond Jews,” Tropper, 44, added. “By making the family strangers to their religion, you’re making anybody who’s also a stranger to the ritual sympathetic to their plight. It was just a way to make the story more universal.”

Tropper jokes that he has become a voice for the messed-up American male. “I like to write about contemporary men who have followed scripts that were handed down to them without thinking about it and realize down the road that they’ve made a mistake,” he said.

Tropper’s 2005 novel, “Everything Changes,” for example, revolves around a man who’s engaged to one woman and infatuated with another; his “How to Talk to a Widower” (2007) follows the travails of a man whose wife has met an untimely demise, leaving him to raise his 15-year-old stepson alone; and “One Last Thing Before I Go” (2012) spotlights a divorcé who is diagnosed with a life-threatening illness around the same time that his teenage daughter announces she is pregnant and his ex-wife is about to marry another man.

Tropper began “This Is Where I Leave You” in the late-2000s, aspiring to “track the downward spiral of a man in the suburbs who loses everything at the same time,” he said. “But the book was just boring until, about 100 pages in, I wrote a chapter where he goes home to visit his family.  And suddenly, for the first time, the book felt like it was coming to life. So I realized I needed to give the story over to that family. Then the question was, why would this guy spend more than an hour with these crazy people, and that was when I came up with making them Jewish and having a shivah.”  

The character of Boner, he added, was based on the wannabe “rock-star rabbis” he knew who’d been less-than-holy students in high school.

Even though Tropper had wanted to become a writer since grade school and earned English degrees from Yeshivah University and New York University, he started his professional life in the 1990s working for his father, selling department store displays to jewelry and watch companies for eight years. “But I didn’t love sales, and it was like a terrible safety net to get stuck in the family business,” he said.

So Tropper wrote novels on weekends and evenings and vowed that if he ever made as much money through writing as he did in sales, he would quit his day job.  That came to pass when Sony Pictures optioned Tropper’s third novel, “Everything Changes,” with an upper-six-figure deal nine years ago. Reimagining the classic comedic film “Harvey” for Steven Spielberg put Tropper on the map as a screenwriter; he went on to sell the movie rights to several more of his books, including “This Is Where I Leave You,” which stunned him because “I assumed that making a shivah movie would not be high on a studio’s to-do list.”  It was the film’s director, Shawn Levy, a Canadian Jew, who helped push the project through during a five-year development process.

People often ask Tropper whether his characters are autobiographical, a concept he “finds mildly insulting because I’m a fiction writer; I make things up,” he said.  

“I’ve written six novels; I can’t be all of those guys,” said Tropper, who is also the co-creator of the “Banshee” TV series on Cinemax. And though he has had writing struggles, a late-term baby that died in utero (he now has three kids) and a recent amicable divorce, Tropper said his own life has been free of the kinds of crises his characters face.

But, he admitted, he can see parts of himself in his protagonists. The fictional Judd “is an avatar for me, absolutely,” he said. “I created him as the kind of guy that I am, which is someone who is built to keep a lid on all of his inner turmoil.  So other than momentary explosions, he’s suffering internally while somehow feeling the need to maintain this calm exterior, and that’s very much the way I handle things.”

“This Is Where I Leave You” opens on Sept. 19.

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