The Savages

The Savages is the stuff of familiar family dysfunction, with a triad of flustered characters at its deeply screwed up core. There's Lenny (Philip Bosco), the petulant, abusive father figure whose mental health is quickly eroding, Wendy (Laura Linney), the pill-popping would-be theater scribe, her brother Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a Bertolt Brecht scholar who can't keep his romantic and professional lives in order, and the specter of an absent mother. It has that oh-so-indie bleak cynicism we're all too familiar with, a bit Noah Baumbach meets Kenneth Lonergan, but writer/director Tamara Jenkins doesn't offer much of an original take on these terse relations.

The shit truly hits the fan—or rather, the wall—for the Savage family when Lenny's dementia kicks in and he's found smearing fecal matter around his dying girlfriend's bathroom. Wendy and Jon are called to retrieve him and struggle with the prospect of caring for the dad that was never there, a man who spits out venomous insults at every opportunity. They stick him in a tolerable nursing home and occasionally visit while trying to harness their own deteriorating worlds. Wendy is carrying out an affair with a married man ten years her senior and lies about receiving a Guggenheim fellowship, while Jon pines for his Polish girlfriend and tries to finish his book. Though intelligent, these aren't the troubled geniuses of The Royal Tenenbaums; the Savages are mundane screw-ups, making them believable, sympathetic, and displaying Jenkins' strength in portraying a somber quotidian.

The film's most profound moments are humiliating in their realism: Wendy having to pull up her father's pants on a plane, reaching out to pet a dog during mediocre sex, and Jon crying over his girlfriend's egg breakfast. "We're not in therapy right now, we're in real life," Jon comments at one point. It's a life wracked by unease at every turn, one that Wendy tries to shroud under what turn out to be comic layers, like the "Get Well" balloon and Urban Outfitters pillow she insists decorate her father's room—as if surrounding Lenny with these superficial items could soften forty years of poor parenting and his impending death.

On the other hand, the austere tone Jenkins sets is also flat-out boring at times. Linney and Hoffman's performances are solid as always, the problem being that they're embodying static characters whose lives aren't fleshed out in an interesting way to reveal their depth. Lacking focus, The Savages sloppily ambles from one scene to the next and its conclusion is unsatisfyingly abrupt. Though Jenkins is a master of nuance—directing audience attention toward the characters' telling idiosyncrasies—her viewpoint is often too granulated and we lose what's happening on a larger level. The result is a film that feels disturbingly human and familiar but ultimately distant and, despite Wendy and Jon's slight evolutions, just plain cold.

—Heidi Atwal
05.01.08