The Savages

This is a great movie, but pay no attention to the DVD packaging calling it "darkly funny", "singularly funny" and so on. While it does have a few good gags that made me laugh out loud once or twice, it's only about 25% comedy and the rest is a heavy, emotional drama about the painful subject of slow, lingering death.

Two siblings (played by Laura Linney & Philip Seymour Hoffman) are burdened with the task of taking care of their estranged father who they learn is suffering from dementia. The comedy is just enough to keep it from getting too depressing but not so much that it upstages the gravity of the situation.

The pacing is appropriately slow. You'll find no car chases, shootouts, contrived romances or M-Night-Shyamalanian twists; the story is not even very significant. Instead, pay attention to the relationships between the characters, their emotional disconnection from each other & the world, and their efforts to confront their lack of intimacy. What's interesting about this movie is that it begins with no details about the characters, but slowly the past emerges and is only fully explained in the final scene.

If you like movies about real life, I think you'll enjoy this. And if you're interested in films about families/people dealing with illnesses & disorders, also check out "Away From Her", "Autumn Hearts", and "Phoebe in Wonderland" ...all good movies without the standard Hollywood cheese.

This film is about how two brothers and sisters react to their father's development of dementia, and the subsequent deterioration of his mental condition.

"The Savages" is a real and authentic film. It uses the pain of dealing with dementia as a backdrop, to explore the relationship of two siblings. Laura Linney's excellent portrayal of Wendy Savage, a daughter in deep denial, is captivating. Her emotional turmoil and her manipulation of others makes her character very deep and interesting. Jon Savage, on the other hand, repeatedly and brutally brings Wendy back on the ground. This strained interaction keeps the tension going throughout the film. Fortunately, this painful and difficult times enables them too understand themselves and care for each other. The ending is sad, but satisfying and human.

"The Savages" is realistic film that people can easily relate to.

The Savages (2007) was written and directed by Tamara Jenkins. Jenkins gets everything right in this film about three family members who barely connect with each other. Laura Linney plays Wendy Savage--a NYC playwright who works as a temp and waits for an artistic breakthrough. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays her brother Jon, who teaches drama at a college in Buffalo. Although the siblings aren't particularly hostile towards each other, they clearly don't have a close or affectionate relationship.

A health crisis makes it necessary for the two to travel to Sun City, Arizona, to care for their father. We only see Lenny Savage as an old man with dementia. He's not exactly a warm and loving person as the film opens. Moreover, we learn that he wasn't a great parent before the dementia, either. Both his son and his daughter don't keep in touch with him, nor he with them. Now they have to deal with a crisis that forces them together.

Hoffman and Linney are two of he finest actors on the screen today, and, when they play off against each other, the result is movie magic. Everything rings true--their love/hate relationship, their professional jealousy, and their disapproval of each other's love life. They aren't exactly the two people best suited to make life and death decisions about their father, but that's the reality they face, and they have to deal with it as best they can.

I've written almost 200 reviews for IMDb, and I've never even considered mentioning the casting director. This review is the exception. My compliments to Jeanne McCarthy, who has filled this movie with an extraordinary set of actors in small roles. Everyone Wendy and Jon meet looks right for the role--nurses, psychologists, administrators, aides, students, etc., etc. It would be worth seeing the movie again just to watch the actors who aren't stars.

There's also an excellent supporting actor. Peter Friedman plays Larry, the married man with whom Wendy is having an affair. Their scene in a motel room is short but both powerful and poignant. (Actually, every scene in which Linney appears is powerful and poignant, but Friedman holds his own in this one.)

We saw the movie in a theater, but an intimate film of this type should do well on DVD. Incidentally, most of the movie takes place in Buffalo, New York, and director Jenkins obviously has a real feel for the city and its people.

This may be the best independent film of 2007. Don't miss it!

As we move ever further into the 21st Century, more and more Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers are finding themselves thrust into the role of primary caregiver to their ailing and aging parents. Such a situation is challenging enough even under the best of circumstances, but what if the person who needs taking care of was never a loving and nurturing parent to begin with, or the middle-aged child has more than enough problems on his own plate to deal with? This is the dilemma faced by John and Wendy Savage, a brother and sister who have long been estranged from the father who left them when they were youngsters but who has now come back into their lives after he can no longer take care of himself. Despite the fact that the siblings feel little emotional attachment to their father, they agree to do the decent thing by caring for him in his final days, even though his dementia makes it nearly impossible for them to heal old wounds or build a filial bridge between them.

Meanwhile, John and Wendy, both unmarried and childless, aren't exactly what one would call models of highly functional and successful adults in their own right. John is a theater professor and part-time author who lives in a shabby Buffalo apartment with a girl from Poland who is being deported because John, commitment-phobic that he is, can't bring himself to marry her. Wendy is an unsuccessful playwright who pays the bills with temp jobs and has been carrying on a dead-end affair with a married man for years.

"The Savages" works on a dual level, exposing the grim realities of aging, while at the same time exploring the complexities of familial (i.e. parent-child and sibling) relationships. The strain on everyone caught in this type of a predicament can be devastating and overwhelming, and writer/director Tamara Jenkins examines the situation from all angles. John and Wendy have an understandable urge to live their own lives, and they feel ill-equipped to cope with this new burden that has been suddenly placed upon them. The situation also opens up old wounds related to their upbringing and heightens their own feelings of inadequacy and failure. John and Wendy are also not above turning against one another when the world gets to be a bit too much for them to handle, wounding each other with verbal thrusts and jabs carefully aimed at their various weaknesses and vulnerabilities.

The subject matter is obviously dark and brooding, but the filmmakers inject a surprising amount of biting, whistling-past-the-graveyard humor to help lighten the load. They are also helped in this regard by the rich and engaging performances of its three leading actors. Philip Seymour Hoffman is remarkably quiet and subdued in his role of John, the more cynical of the two children who feels a little less guilt-ridden about doing the minimum for a man who never took on the very role of paternal caregiver to his children that they are assuming for him. As the father, Philip Bosco rises to the difficult challenge of portraying a man who's lost much of his ability to connect with the world around him. But it is Laura Linney who provides the warm human center that lifts the movie above the dreary nature of its material. It is Wendy who struggles most with doing what is right by trying to make the last days of a man who abandoned her as comfortable as possible. In her every word and gesture, Linney shows that she understands the paradoxical nature of the character she is being called on to play, revealing her weaknesses and vulnerabilities, while, at the same time, showing her to be a woman of strength and character, even if she has trouble displaying much of either of those qualities in her own life. In fact, we sense that Wendy does quite a bit of growing up in the course of her struggles. Wendy may hate her father for never being there for her and her brother, but she knows maturity means moving beyond one's bitterness over the past and responding to the basic humanity of even the most undeserving among us.

What I like about "The Savages" is that it doesn't devolve into angst-ridden hand-wringing or self-aggrandizing melodramatics in dealing with its topic. Instead, in this her fifth film as a director, Jenkins illuminates a difficult subject with subtlety, insight and compassion. Definitely one worth seeing.

Any film that features Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman is certainly worth seeing, and the acting in "The Savages" is excellent, not only by Linney and Hoffman but by Philip Bosco who plays their father, Lenny, an elderly man suffering from dementia. The story line - - two grown children facing the task of caring for a failing parent -- is all too familiar in real life, and anyone who's been through it knows how emotionally wrenching it can be. The complication here is that both children feel that they were mistreated by their father during childhood.

Jon, Hoffman's character, a drama professor is less devastated by the reality, though perhaps not by the memory. Wendy, Linney's character, is torn apart by both. There's another story line as well. Jon has just been separated from his long time girl friend, a Polish drama teacher whose visa has expired. Wendy, who's been trying to write a play about her childhood trauma and seeking a grant to permit her to do so, is having sex with an older married man (more at his convenience than hers).

But the story is mainly about their search for a nursing home that will have their father. (Wendy would prefer a beautiful space that offers "assisted living" which her father can no longer manage.) And after they've found the nursing home, they have to cope with their father's demented behavior and their own emotional states. After Lenny dies, the script seeks a hopeful but unconvincing resolution. The brief, uncertain up-tick at the end does not make this film any less of a downer. But the acting is superb. It's to be expected of Linney and Hoffman. Though it's not likely that many viewers will have noticed Bosco before, he's been an excellent stage actor and, in some ways, his may be the most impressive performance of the three.