Most of us are perfectly happy to spend our time at the movies watching people being riddled with bullets, impaled upon various kitchen and garden tools, devoured by mutant insects, etc., secure in the knowledge that we’re exceedingly unlikely ever to suffer such a sorry fate. Decrepitude, on the other hand, makes us very uncomfortable: We know it’s lurking in our future—assuming the mutant insects never show up, that is—and we don’t care to think about it. Consequently, you can count the number of films that address senile dementia on the fingers of one destined-to-be-withered hand. It takes a brave soul to tackle a subject so plainly depressing and uncommercial, which makes it doubly impressive that The Savages is the brainchild of Tamara Jenkins, who hadn’t made another movie since her sharp and funny 1998 debut, Slums of Beverly Hills. You’d think someone who hadn’t worked in nine years would shy away from anything with the faintest whiff of alienation about it, rather than charge directly at viewers with an uncompromising reminder of their own mortality.
As it happens, the film’s very title bespeaks Jenkins’ no-bullshit approach. Anybody who’s even vaguely familiar with Peter Pan will know to expect arrested adolescence when introduced to a brother and sister pointedly named Jon and Wendy. Change the family surname from Darling to Savage, however, and you’re clearly talking about some world-class screwups. Here, 40-ish Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman, really working the schlump), a college professor specializing in Brecht, and Wendy (Laura Linney, surprisingly manic), a failed playwright subsisting on temp work, must put aside decades of interpersonal rancor in order to tend to their ailing father, Lenny (Philip Bosco), whom they both resent for having been a distant and demanding figure throughout their motherless childhood. Significantly, neither Jon nor Wendy is married or has children, making them singularly ill-equipped to take responsibility for the welfare of another human being. Squabbling and recriminations ensue, as do heated discussions on the amenities of various nursing homes and the wisdom of allowing poor, fading Dad to show The Jazz Singer in a facility staffed largely by black immigrants.
Shrewdly, Jenkins opens The Savages with a sunny, surreal credits sequence in which a troupe of senior citizens decked out in garish costumes performs a slo-mo tap-dance routine, the memory of which seems cruelly mocking once the film moves to dismal, gray-skied Buffalo. For the rest of the movie, even the able-bodied characters barely lift their feet. Black humor abounds, but the prevailing mood is one of defeat and frustration, especially since both of these adult children are struggling at work and hopelessly entangled in failed relationships. (Wendy seems more attached to her married lover’s dog than she does to the man himself.) What keeps you from wanting to slit your wrists is the typically nuanced work of Linney and Hoffman, both of whom mine coarse nuggets of emotional truth from the sediment created by years of buried discontent. It’s particularly gratifying to see Linney, who’s too often burdened with the sensible role, as a near-pathological liar whose every base instinct involves maintaining the illusion that she’s fully in control of her life—an illusion that Wendy herself shares.
Still, for all the film’s courage and expertise, there’s something faintly rote about the way that everything plays out. Jon and Wendy are screwed up in neatly complementary ways—she’s the underachieving neurotic, he’s the repressed academic—and their adventure with Dad allows each one to take precisely the tiny, credible personal-growth step (s)he needs; the result is solid rather than exciting, carefully covering all the expected restrained-indie bases. The Savages boasts plenty of keenly observed moments, but it’s also the kind of film in which someone says, “He won’t marry me, but he cries when I make him eggs,” and two scenes later, sure enough, there the guy is choking back tears at the breakfast table. All you need do is take another look at You Can Count on Me—another quietly incisive Sundance favorite, also starring Linney as the sister—to see how much more potent and affecting sibling melodrama can be.