The Savages
The title of “The Savages” suggests violence, cruelty, lack of refinement. It’s a canny bit of misdirection by writer-director Tamara Jenkins. Her main characters, siblings Wendy and Jon Savage, have plenty of flaws, but they’re ultimately kind and generous. Forced to care for their father, who’s suffering from dementia, they muddle through as best they can. As Wendy and Jon, Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman underplay beautifully – you always understand what they’re feeling, and you believe it. Linney appears unlikely to take home the Academy Award for Best Actress, but she deserves it. Her savvy choices and peerless instincts illuminate the subtleties in Jenkins’s script. She locates Wendy’s guilt and self-loathing with ease. And when Wendy talks about prescription drugs with the enthusiasm of a connoisseur, you know you’re in the presence of a singular and full-blooded character. Hoffman is gruff but soulful: He plays Jon as a smart guy whose insight extends to his own shortcomings. He’s good at piercing Wendy’s illusions, as when he delivers a memorably bleak monologue about the purpose of nursing homes. “The Savages” doesn’t let the assisted-living industry off the hook, but Jenkins sees things from all sides and looks compassionately at the hardworking nursing home staff. She’s not a master stylist, but she’s a confident, unpretentious storyteller. “The Savages” teases out everyday dilemmas with grace and grit.
LISTEN: The Savages
Earlier, longer review after the jump.
My goodness, what a touching and admirably restrained movie. Everyone underplays beautifully — following the quiet assurance of the lead actors, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney, and the writer-director, Tamara Jenkins. Her previous feature, “Slums of Beverly Hills” (1998), was equally honest and heartfelt, albeit with more laugh-out-loud one-liners. I hope the acclaim earned by “The Savages” means we won’t have to wait another nine years for her next one.
While it’s often funny — it’s been marketed as a dark comedy — “The Savages” is more accurately described as a family drama that finds the occasional, inevitable silliness in a grim situation. Wendy Savage (Linney), a struggling playwright, and her brother Jon (Hoffman), a theater professor, are thrust into the unlikely roles of caregivers for their father, Leonard (Philip Bosco), who’s suffering from dementia. Wendy and Jon could describe their lives with a line from Conor McPherson’s outstanding new play “Shining City”: “We’re just barely fuckin’ hangin’ on.” Jon has an unglamorous teaching position at a college in Buffalo and won’t marry his Polish girlfriend even though her visa’s about to expire; Manhattan-based Wendy works temp jobs to make ends meet and sleeps with a married man (Peter Friedman, quietly smug) who drops by when he’s walking his dog.
Because family crises rarely intervene at the ideal time, Wendy and Jon find out that their father’s longtime girlfriend has died, leaving him with no place to live. (They cohabitated in Sun City, Ariz., and Jenkins captures the sunbaked strangeness of the desert retirement community in a few economical shots.) Plus, Leonard is starting to lose his mind. Although he abandoned them decades earlier, the siblings have no choice but to come to his aid. They scramble to place him in a nursing home in Buffalo, and Wendy moves in with Jon temporarily to help ease the transition. Thankfully, “The Savages” shows the inadequacies of nursing homes without harping on them. Wendy doesn’t like the facility that Jon picks out and tries to find a nicer one, but Jon eloquently pierces her illusions in a memorably bleak bit of dialogue. Over time, the staff at the no-frills home, largely made up of African and Caribbean immigrants (Wendy assumes that a Nigerian is Jamaican, much to her mortification), proves itself hardworking and compassionate. I found “The Savages” to be a more rounded and persuasive study of the elderly and their care than “Away From Her.” As luminous as Julie Christie is in that movie, Bosco’s performance is more plausible — and perhaps sadder.
While Wendy and Jon indulge in goofiness from time to time, the movie mostly wends along casually, teasing out everyday dilemmas like what to do with Wendy’s cat, who’s cooped up in her New York apartment. Linney and Hoffman are brilliant in an entirely unspectacular way — you always understand what they’re feeling, and you believe it. Linney locates Wendy’s guilt and self-loathing — she tends to embellish her resume in casual conversation. And she’s slyly hilarious whenever she expresses her enthusiasm for prescription medication. (”I take that!” she says when a doctor uses a pen that advertises Xanax.) Hoffman is gruff but soulful; Jon is a smart guy who’s well aware of his shortcomings. The title suggests an edge that the characters lack; “The Savages” could have been called “Ordinary People.” Its ordinariness becomes moving and resonant.