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THE SAVAGES Send This Review to a Friend
Writer-director Tamara Jenkins’s new film “The Savages” works beautifully on a split level. While the film deals with sadness of senile elderly having to be installed in a home for the aged, it also chronicles the closing of an emotional gap between an estranged brother and sister in the course of finding facilities for their father out of duty rather than love for him. The acting impresses as so true to life that one gets to know the characters closely, and that’s apart from any plus of being able to recognize truths as they might apply to one’s own family.
Jenkins has the gift of being able to find gallows humor even in a dire situation. Philip Bosco can break your heart as the father fading into senility, and it is awful that he has begun to write on the bathroom wall with his feces. Yet there is something sickly funny in how this upsets someone caring for him. Bosco as Lenny Savage manages to maintain a measure of dignity even in moments of pathos.
The brother and sister are played Philip Seymour Hoffman as Jon Savage and Laura Linney as Wendy Savage, and if you know anything about their past acting, you’ll know that you are virtually guaranteed two superb performances. Jon is a professor in Buffalo, N.Y. working on a project about Bertolt Brecht, and he is a phlegmatic type, plodding along without the resoluteness to deal with his needs. He has a Polish girlfriend who loves him, but unable to commit, he is prepared to let her return to Poland.
Wendy is a struggling Manhattan playwright seeking grants and having an affair with a married man. She resents being looked down upon by her brother as someone not sufficiently talented, his attitude reflecting lack of belief in the possibility of a woman being as bright as he thinks he is. Wendy will resort to a lie in order to combat his macho, older-brother dismissal of her ability.
Their approach to their father is opposite. Lenny has never been much of a dad to either, and Jon’s attitude, is that all nursing homes are alike, and therefore just put him in the most opportune one and that’s that. They take Lenny to Buffalo from Arizona, where he has been living with his wife with her family. Now that his wife has died, he no longer has any rights there. Jon would just as soon put him somewhere close for convenience. Hence, Buffalo.
Wendy is wracked with guilt about having to use a nursing home. She searches for a more upscale facility, a step mocked by her brother. The practical and emotional problems that arise as they look after their father brings them closer as barriers erected in the past are battered and they gain a better understanding of one another through conversations and events.
The screenplay is rich in detail and character study, and Jenkins directs with a dramatic flow that preserves the intimacy of the writing. Above all, the acting is nuanced and convincing throughout. The film is important because it deals with a problem that confronts many families. But it is also dramatically rewarding because of how fascinatingly it depicts the growth in a brother-sister relationship. A Fox Searchlight Pictures release.
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