a review by Jeffrey Overstreet
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Director – Tamara Jenkins
Executive Producer – Alexander Payne
Set Dresser – Karing Poryazian
Production Assistant – Michael Lizzio
Producer’s Assistant – Kara Blanchard
Driver – Ken Johnson
Electrician – James Bastian
Assistant Hair – Claudia Breckinridge
Producer – Ted Hope
Production Assistant – Laura Felschow
Laura Linney (Wendy Savage), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Jon Savage), Philip Bosco (Lenny Savage), Peter Friedman (Larry)
113 minutes. R (for some sexuality and language)
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The opening of The Savages makes you think you’re in for a smart, cynical, sharp-edged comedy a la Alexander Payne. We move into a Sun City, Arizona neighborhood that looks suspiciously like the suburbia of Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands. And we brace ourselves for an acidic, acerbic critique of middle-class America.
Instead, we’re treated to a nuanced, convincing portrait of a brother-sister relationship. We’re surprised by what may be the finest performances of two great actors: Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman. And best of all, we’re given a remarkable, respectful portrait of the service performed by compassionate healthcare professionals who attend to the elderly.
As disagreeable siblings brought together by their father’s declining health, Linney and Hoffman find remarkable chemistry, and strike a perfect balance of drama and comedy in completely convincing turns. Wendy (Linney) is involved in a foolish affair with a married man (Peter Friedman), desperate for love in her lonely cubicle-bound existence. Jon (Hoffman) is a professor facing a burdensome book deadline. For both of them, the challenge of moving their father to a nursing home is inconvenient and maddening. Their slow process of learning to live together and love each other is also a thought-provoking story about the responsibility we have to care for our elders.
Perhaps the fact that both characters are struggling writers suggests that there is something autobiographical in writer/director Tamara Jenkins’ funny, unpredictable script. (There’s a moment involving breakfast that will have the audience in stitches.)
No review of this film would be complete without praise for Philip Bosco, the veteran of stage and screen whose performance here is a bold, endearing portrait of Lenny, a man losing his grip on his senses. Alongside Sarah Polley’s astonishing film Away from Her, The Savages gives us another serious examination of human sufferings rarely portrayed on the big screen. Both films stand as a challenge to those of us who have yet to navigate such emotionally turbulent waters as these. Will we learn the kind of compassion that is, eventually, demonstrated by the troubled children in these films?
