Monday, July 28, 2008

The Savages (2007, Director: Tamara Jenkins): Described by at least one critic as a “coming-of-middle-age” film, Tamara Jenkins’ quietly powerful film covers some ground familiar to many of us entering (or enduring) our forties. John Savage (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and his sister Wendy (Laura Linney) are both unmar­ried, child­less, and absorbed in their own lives. He’s a pro­fessor in Buffalo, she’s a strug­gling play­wright in New York. They’re not par­tic­u­larly close, until Wendy receives the sort of phone call that we all dread. Something’s wrong with their father, and they’ll have to put him into a nursing home. In the best of fam­ilies, this would be a night­mare, but Wendy and John didn’t grow up in the best of fam­ilies. It’s never made explicit, but it’s clear that their father was absent at best and abusive at worst, and they haven’t kept in touch in many years. Their mother is also out of the pic­ture, and it’s heart­breaking to see these two trying to deal with a man neither of them knows very well.

Wendy exhibits the guilt you’d expect of a daughter who hasn’t kept in touch. She over­com­pensates, trying to get father Lenny (Philip Bosco) into the “best” nursing home pos­sible, even as it’s clear his dementia renders him incap­able of grasping his situ­ation. John is more stoic, but his anger sim­mers until an explosive con­front­a­tion with Wendy in a nursing home parking lot. These sib­lings, neither of whom has really settled into adult­hood, are forced to con­front the fact that their father is dying. Worse, he’s beyond the point where they’ll ever get to know him or the reasons behind his mis­treat­ment of them. I appre­ci­ated this aspect of the story, that Jenkins didn’t try to make this episode the venue for a too-pat “recon­cili­ation.” John and Wendy remain angry and con­flicted about this man, but they do their best, and in the end, the ordeal allows them to move on a little fur­ther into adulthood.

Both Linney and Hoffman are superb, and while the sub­ject matter sounds unbear­ably grim, there are many moments of wel­come humour and human con­nec­tion. Although the dir­ec­tion is for the most part under­stated, I espe­cially appre­ci­ated some of the cine­ma­to­graphy near the begin­ning of the film, when these East Coast intel­lec­tuals must retrieve their father from the garish and bizarre retire­ment com­munity of Sun City, Arizona.

Official site of the film

Purchase the DVD from Amazon.com
Purchase the DVD from Amazon.ca

(8/10)

Tagged as: aging, fathers-and-sons

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