Dour, Sour Film ‘The Savages’ Tells Family’s Sorrowful Story
By Soren Andersen, The News Tribune, Tacoma, Wash.
Feb. 29–* *
The Savages
Director: Tamara Jenkins
Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Laura Linney, Philip Bosco, Peter Friedman, Gbenga Akinnagbe
Running Time: 1:53
Rating: R; language, sexual situations, incontinence
Where: Grand Cinema, 606 S. Fawcett Ave., Tacoma; showtimes, Pages 23-24 Faced with an unpleasant situation — their aging father’s descent into irreversible dementia — a middle-age brother and sister respond with unappealing unpleasantness.
The siblings are a self-centered, peevish pair. The sister, Wendy (Laura Linney), is a scuffling playwright who lives in a crummy East Village apartment. She makes ends meet by working dead-end temp jobs and keeps monotony at bay — barely — with a loveless affair with a married neighbor (Peter Friedman).
Her brother, Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman), is a professor at an upstate college who lives a life of quiet despair.
Neither has had much to do with the other for some time. But when their father (Philip Bosco) begins to deteriorate mentally and physically they’re forced to join forces and relocate him from a cushy Florida retirement community to a nursing home nearer to their own homes. They do not respond well to this.
They respond, in fact, with maximum sourness. They were never close to their emotionally distant dad. And they’ve never been too fond of each other. Hoffman and Linney, fine actors both (she was Oscar-nominated for this role), do an excellent job of keeping the bile bubbling nearly all the way to the finish.
Writer-director Tamara Jenkins established herself as a filmmaker to watch back in the late ’90s with an insightful little indie comedy, “The Slums of Beverly Hills.” It was a coming-of-age story with bite and brains animated by a sly sense of humor. With “The Savages,” humor has left the building.
If there’s anything funny about the business of arranging for the care of a dying loved one, Jenkins certainly hasn’t found it. As she delves deeply into the dispiriting details of the siblings’ struggle to find a facility where their failing father will be kept clean and safe, a facility, furthermore, they can afford, her movie turns into a kind of grim forced march.
The unrelenting accumulation of all those sorrowful details and the despondency, sometimes quiet at other times shrill, that plagues the siblings grinds the viewer down.
Jenkins attempts to end on a bittersweet note, but she gets the recipe wrong. Bitterness is the only aftertaste left behind by “The Savages.”
Soren Andersen: 253-597-8742, Ext. 6235
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