Film

Alongside last month’s Repo Men, The Joneses belongs in a group of better-living satires that lack a grasp of rudimentary economics. To give away no more than the press materials do: Say you dressed up a group of actors as a fake family, giving each one a set of products to hawk over several months. How much would you pay them? How many items could they sell relative to that price? How long could you keep it up before your company went bust (or at least got buried in union grievances)?

Set in an alternate universe where viral marketing seems to have never harnessed the power of the Internet, this amusing but benign send-up outdoes The Truman Show in sheer quaintness (and makes The Stepford Wives look edgy). Needless to say, not all is paradise when Demi Moore’s sales unit (“dad” David Duchovny, along with “kids” Amber Heard and Ben Hollingsworth) moves into a McSuburb and begins to show off its golf clubs and reheated gourmet food, which the neighbors immediately purchase in kind. There’s no such thing as the perfect family, and conscience often comes into conflict with capitalism: Unless these are revelations, The Joneses is an exercise in inevitability, with a late-breaking development that suggests a classic case of a screenwriter seeking a hasty exit. Moore and Duchovny are more likable than they’ve been in some time. The movie they’re in, however, may inspire buyer’s remorse.