The Joneses have it all: the great new car, the great new flat-screen TV — all the great new stuff of every consumer's dreams. And they've brought it all to their great new house in a new town where they plan to, as one of them puts it, "do some damage."
These people — father Steve (David Duchovny), mother Kate (Demi Moore) and perfect kids Jenn (Amber Heard) and Mick (Ben Hollingsworth) — are traveling envy dispensers. They're not really a family; they're a sales team employed by a marketing company to travel around from town to town, putting down temporary roots and fomenting lust among their new neighbors for all the high-end goods they've brought along with them. Manufacturers pay big money for the sales spikes the Joneses trigger, and once the team's latest locale is played out, they move on to a new upscale suburb in search of new suckers.
The movie might have amounted to nothing more than its high concept if it weren't for the actors. Duchovny plays Steve — the new guy on the team — as a rootless man in search of human connection who slowly realizes that signing on for this job, in which he doesn't even get to sleep with his "wife," may have been a big mistake. And Moore, as the all-business team leader, effectively portrays Kate as a woman of buried warmth who does everything she can to keep it hidden (haters may be surprised at how good this sometimes off-putting actress is). Hollingsworth is a hunk of the entirely likable variety, and Heard is ... well, she's Amber Heard, here keeping her clothes on for the most part, and very funny as the weak link in the team (her real passion is for jumping older men).
The concept plays out pretty much as you'd expect. We see Steve at a golf course, where the local fairway hotshots are drooling over his expensive new clubs; Kate at home, wowing the neighborhood women with her stock of domestic wonders (frozen sushi!); and Mick and Jenn impressing their new high-school friends with pricey fashions and slick new cell phones. Modest plot complexities are provided by the Joneses' neighbors, Larry and Summer (Gary Cole and Glenne Headly), who prove tragically vulnerable to the new family's siren song of boundless materialism; by Lauren Hutton as KC, a steely home-office exec who turns up to evaluate the team's sales stats; and by Christine Evangelista, who gives the film's most emotionally affecting performance as Naomi, a sales-resistant local girl who's romantically drawn to Mick (who has a dark secret that complicates their relationship).
Director Derrick Borte keeps the story chugging along in an efficient if generally unsurprising way. There are some clever twists (although an attempted shocking development is a fizzling clichй) and some solid laughs, too. But the movie is never quite as lively as we'd like it to be — it might've benefitted from a little satirical nastiness. The story seems to offer more than it ever really delivers, and in the end we're not quite sold.
Don't miss Kurt Loder's reviews of "Kick-Ass" and "Exit Through the Gift Shop," also new in theaters this week.
Check out everything we've got on "The Joneses."
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