'Keeping Up with the Joneses' Surprisingly Sedate

Jeff and Karen Gaffney (Zach Galifianakis, Isla Fisher) live a stunningly quiet life on an impossibly suburban Atlanta cul-de-sac. “Kinko’s was bananas,” a neighbor tells Jeff as Karen and he return from sending their kids off in a bright yellow school bus to summer camp. “It often is!” Jeff responds, without a hint of irony. Enter Tim and Natalie Jones (Jon Hamm, Gal Gadot), a “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” pair of spies masquerading—poorly—as the Gaffney’s new neighbors.

As with most comedies, the film’s first half hour is by far its strongest. In some of the film’s better camera work, the Joneses are introduced from the perspective of Karen, spying on them through a window, and seem to glow with the stylish allure of, well, Hollywood A-listers. Even the blurry phone photos of the couple she sends to Jeff look like glamour shots.

Initial establishing scenes for characters are understated and delightful. Tim holds guests at a block party (“Junetoberfest”) spellbound with a story of his near-death experience lost in the desert, casually opening a beer bottle with his wedding ring; Jeff Gaffney, standing next to him, attempts to do the same and shatters the bottle in his hand. Across the lawn, Natalie Jones, dressed like a runway model, plays darts like a professional knife thrower.

The dichotomy of this film relies on the total normalcy of the Gaffneys, and both Fisher and Galifianakis deliver credible straight-man performances. Such a role is particularly unusual for Galifianakis, whose fame as a comic actor is built on playing awkward, oddball characters. Nevertheless, his Jeff is believable and generous; it would have been easy to bring a hammier character, but “Keeping Up with the Joneses” would likely have been a worse movie for it. Fisher’s Karen, an interior decorator tasked with uninspiring projects like adding a urinal to a home bathroom, is also quite good. Nobody will be handing out Oscars to either Galifianakis or Fisher, but neither could really have done much better with characters designed explicitly to be ordinary.

Hamm and Gadot have the opposite problem. Their characters, as written, are manifestly unbelievable under even the slightest scrutiny. Gadot is largely shielded by director Greg Mottola: With the exception of a few lines (“I may not need to moisturize, but I still have feelings,” Natalie tells Karen), her character is not called upon to demonstrate any sort of interior life. Hamm, meanwhile, proves so naturally charismatic that much like Brad Pitt as Mr. Smith, his superspy-suburbanite seems at least plausible as long as he is physically onscreen. That said, the film probably looks a little too closely at his character: Superspies are much more appealing at a slight distance.

Michael LeSieur’s script, which features the Joneses looking into local company MBI while the Gaffneys look into them, requires quite a bit of suspension of disbelief as well. Other than noting that Natalie is a beautiful, accomplished woman who wears short dresses, the film does not explain why Karen suspects the Joneses so quickly. And do trained spies really need to embed themselves in a suburban neighborhood—they buy and furnish an entire house—in order to pull this job off? (No.)

That said, if one can swallow the storyline, the plot moves along at a pleasant, leisurely pace. There are a few action scenes, but the over-the-top violence typical of spy movies is largely forced into the background by the overwhelming normalcy of Jeff and Karen Gaffney. In one scene, the Gaffneys hold up a rescue by bickering back and forth, a steady stream of bullets conveniently missing them. The moment scans almost like a parody of the spy genre, in which it seems absolutely impossible for a significant character to be casually shot in a firefight.

At the end of the day, “Keeping Up with the Jones” is a fundamentally conservative movie: All its main characters are doing fine, and they’re all going to be fine. Unusually for a comedy, the film depicts stable, grounded people in stable, grounded marriages. Despite the occasional frustration, there is no indication that either the Gaffneys or the Joneses are unhappy with their marriage. No one is psychotically wacky; no one is cringe-inducingly awkward. The resulting film ends up being rather restrained: There is very little reliance on physical comedy, and (thankfully) almost no cringe comedy.

Unfortunately, LeSieur and Mottola don’t seem to have found an entirely satisfying way to end the movie. Their film, which draws its comedy from a contrast of characters rather than an interesting plot, has no clear point at which to stop. But audience patience isn’t unlimited, and so “Keeping Up with the Joneses” ends after about an hour and a half—not resolved, exactly, but simply over.

Staff writer J. Thomas Westbrook can be reached at thomas.westbrook@thecrimson.com.