Bringing Out The Dad | Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney puzzle out the fate of their dementia-addled father in The Savages.
THE SAVAGES
Directed by Tamara Jenkins. Starring Laura Linney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Philip Bosco. Now playing.
4 Stars
I’ve been derided in the past for not always liking independent film. Bah, I say. Just because it has kooky music, depressed characters, and a Sundance hard-on doesn’t make something a good movie! But now and then an indie comes along that is genuinely hot damn excellent, and makes me look like a savage.
Where Juno is too clever for its own good, The Savages has a script worthy of cinéma-vérité. Where The Diving Bell and the Butterfly aches in silence, The Savages doesn’t leave too much unsaid.
Wendy Savage (Laura Linney) is a playwright who steals office supplies from her temp job to apply for foundation grants. She’s a 39-year-old starving artist who reaches out to touch the paw of her married lover’s dog while having sex, just to feel some connection.
Her brother John (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is trying to finish a book on Bertolt Brecht. He’ll let his Polish girlfriend of three years be deported before marrying her, and he wears the rumpled exhaustion of a liberal arts prof driving a 20-year-old Corolla and trying to make tenure in Buffalo.
The Smurfs, they ain’t. But when they have to bring their dementing father (Philip Bosco) from Arizona to a nursing home closer to home, they discover that there really isn’t any way to put the “fun” back in dysfunctional.
The joy (if that’s the right word) in The Savages is its realism. The helpless guilt, the awkward confrontations, the unwise choices—oh my God, it’s like my family at Christmas!
But writer/director Jenkins has an eye for the small, surreal things in life, from the trees looming over our heads as we drive past them in the car to the moral conundrum of whether it’s okay to steal a dead woman’s Percocet. (Hint: it is.) Her vision of Sun City is like a Tim Burton/John Waters love child, and even makes the dinginess of upstate New York in November a breath of frigidly fresh air.
Linney and Hoffman are like a casting director’s wet dream. These two can get blood from rocks, and then open up their own veins to supplement. Both deserve the accolades they’re getting for this picture, even if Hoffman’s performance is a little too opaque at times.
And while I take issue with any academic who answers his cellphone in class, I can overlook it for the humour in watching him squirm when he realizes that his choice for nursing home movie night, Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer, might not go over well with the African-American residents and staff. Oh Mammy!
The only problem with The Savages is that I think it might be mismarketed. It’s not a quirky comedy—no funnier, anyway, than life in general tends to be. It left a strong impression on me, not the least of which was a sudden urge to call my father and promise never to put him in a nursing home.
