At one point in Shawn Levy’s funerals-bring-a-family-together dramedy This Is Where I Leave You (rated R), a character asks the grieving widow (Jane Fonda) how she is persevering through these tough days. Her compound answer ends with a comic closer – “I’ve been popping Xanax like they were Tic Tacs” – that’s as apt a metaphor as we’re likely to find for this entire picture. Levy’s film, inappropriately marketed as a comedy prior to its release, is a fairly dark yet utterly affirming family drama with wisecracks thrown in to keep things from tumbling into the abyss. It’s the cinematic version of a long, satisfying hug; and if you’re in the mood for such an embrace, you’ll love it. If not, well….

Written by Jonathan Tropper from his 2010 novel, the film is a template-based story of an estranged clan fitfully re-knotting the unraveled ties that bind over the course of a mournful, chaotic week back in the family homestead. We open on middle-son Judd Altman (Jason Bateman) discovering his wife has been cheating on him for the last year with his boss. That pretty much throws his marriage and his career overboard, and he’s barely had a chance to grow a sensitive-guy beard before the call comes in that his dad has died.

Judd returns home to reunite with his mom and three siblings – Paul (Corey Stoll), the burdened eldest child who stayed in town to run the family business; Wendy (Tina Fey), a wife and mother with an inattentive husband and a past; and Phillip (Adam Driver), the ne’er-do-well baby of the family, who arrives home with his two-decades-older girlfriend (Connie Britton) in tow. The distance between these grown kids is palpable; they haven’t all been in the same room together in years, and it’s not hard to see the cracks in the plaster. When Mom tells everyone that Dad’s final wish was that the Altman family sit Shiva for the full seven days, the kids bicker with the rabbi about getting that number down to three.

What follows is as practiced and efficient as a tennis pro idly knocking balls across the net. Each member of the family has his or her own baggage, and darned if that luggage won’t be unpacked and neatly put away over the course of that week – aided and abetted by the occasional dalliance with long-forgotten hometown crushes (Rose Byrne for Bateman, Timothy Olyphant for Fey), more than a little medicinal cannabis, and the ultimate reassurance that it’s never too late to pick up the pieces of your life and start again.

If it all sounds too pat and formulaic (with said formula to be repeated in a few weeks, when The Judge arrives in local theaters), This Is Where I Leave You still manages to achieve a sense of effortless charm that can melt the hardest of hearts. Bateman and Fey, normally masters of sardonic delivery, somehow find the right fit as a brother and sister who can connect believably, and affectionately, even when they’re ticking each other off. Fonda, too, manages to resist caricature despite the early zingers lobbed her way over her character’s gargantuan breast implants. The rest of the talented cast is more or less wasted on seat-filler roles; there’s too much going on for most the actors to make an impression.

Levy, who’s slowly digging himself out of comedy juvenile detention after a long string of family-friendly fare like the Cheaper By the Dozen and Night at the Museum franchises, here continues his vaguely redemptive streak that began with the somewhat unexpected Date Night (also with Fey) in 2010 and Real Steel in 2011. This is probably his strongest film to date – it takes some skill to juggle all these talented actors, even if so many don’t get enough to do – but it could have used a lot more zest. The aesthetic is anesthetic – it’s the kind of film in which outrageous things happen (surprise pregnancies, multiple adulteries, trips to the hospital, cars being flipped over or stolen altogether) and yet no one ever really gets too riled up. Someone’s been dipping into Mama Fonda’s stash of antidepressants again.

(IMAGE: Tina Fey, Corey Stoll, Jane Fonda, Jason Bateman and Adam Driver in This Is Where I Leave You. Photo courtesy of Warner Bros.)