When their estranged father falls ill with dementia, a female playwright (Laura Linney) and her professor brother (Philip Seymour Hoffman) are forced to come together to find a nursing him to put him in.

CRITIQUE

The Savages is the kind of hyper-realistic family drama (like the recent Margot At The Wedding) that is never very fun to watch; though there are moments of humor, most of it is so real, slow and only minimally plot-driven that it verges on being off-putting at times.  What really saves this is the cast:  Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman are typically very strong as Wendy and Jon, Philip Bosco does some great work as their father Lenny, and though this is something I’m not liable to watch again for a while, I’m glad I saw it, and it is worth checking out.

The main issue here is the pain of putting a parent in a nursing home, though the issues are complicated for Wendy and Jon here by the fact that they didn’t have a happy childhood (Wendy is even writing a play about it) and haven’t seen their father is a long time.  Wendy and Jon are both flawed, lonely people, and though the point of the script is about how this experience might change them (or not), it’s a rather flimsy idea to carry the action here, and at times this really just works because we’re watching strong actors bouncing off each other, and not because their character stories are really developed enough.

Still, screenwriter/director Tamara Jenkins (Slums of Beverly Hills) does a good job getting us involved in the painful process of the characters trying to figure out where to stash a father they haven’t quite sort of figured out their feelings for, while Lenny is a new combination of unpredictable coherency and incoherency.  The dialogue is sharp, and there are a lot of well-observed scenes throughout, while the film also avoids falling into the cycles of endless bickering that make lesser films of this type become off-putting..

The result is really a very small tale, and not for everyone.  But it does manage to be pretty good of its type, Linney’s work is well worth her Oscar nomination (the script also was nominated) and as an actor’s showcase it’s pretty solid.

THE VIDEO

The Savages looks okay, though there are scenes that aren’t all that vivid.  Technical information was not included with the screening copy.

THE AUDIO

The Savages is presented in English and Spanish5.1 Dolby Surround.  Dialogue, music and sound effects come through clear.  There are English, French and Spanish subtitles.

THE EXTRAS

There is a fairly solid 21-minute Making Of Featurette, in which the cast, director and producers talk about the making of the film.

There are two negligible Extended Scenes, one of old women dancing, the other of an aging lounge act performing a song in its entirety.

There is a section displaying 64 black-and-white Snapshots taken by director Tamara Jenkins.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney would be interesting reading the phone book, and here they have a lot more to work with than that, even though overall it’s fairly glum stuff.