The Savages

12 Apr 2008, 2pm

Great, great setup. Two unsteady, fortyish siblings – he a theatre professor with no soul, she a writer without any ideas (she taps out grant applications for unproduceable plays while pretending to work as a temp). All they share as adults are the memories of an unpleasant childhood – mom legged it early on, dad was indifferent and something of a dick – and the sudden news that the father, sliding into dementia on the other side of the country, can no longer take care of himself.

And how can you not look forward to a movie with both Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney in it? I don’t recall ever watching either of them and not thinking that something wonderful was going on there, although as caregiver to Jason Robards in Magnolia he really had nothing to work with, and nobody should ever have to be the comic sidekick to Ben Stiller. As for Linney, well, I think it’s best to make like Love, Actually never happened.

Here she’s just a jewel: she defines Wendy Savage – manipulative but sweet, morally focused but misled by skewed self-image and blurry ambition, uncomfortable in her single-woman-with-cat apartment – with such clarity and skill you draw a quick breath. In the middle of being half-heartedly, joylessly banged by her lothario building superintendent, she reaches out to caress his dog.

Hoffman, as Jon Savage, is of course just so fucking good. No use trying to convey the man’s ease with subtle gestures and ability to inhabit a character: you’re as aware of it as I am.

The dry bassline of uneasy comedy that runs through the picture is just right, similar in many ways to Noah Baumbach’s last couple of films. Brother and sister bicker and shoot each other down, and it’s good fun, but, amid the relentless reminders of how hard it must be to deal with the decline of a parent, the on-again, off-again warmth between the two is convincing and unforced, showing a wonderfully sure hand on the part of writer/director Tamara Jenkins, where other filmmakers would have given in to the need for quickly-resolved narrative arcs and easy generosity between characters over the monotonies and messy disappointments of real life. And thanks to her as well for respecting the audience enough to strongly infuse parts of the movie with that nursing home smell: it’s real, it’s going to happen, we all need to get used to it.

The great Philip Bosco plays the father with angry helplessness; really strong stuff. And there’s a quietly perfect little appearance by Gbenga Akinnagbe, who killed a lot of people on The Wire.

Having seen both now, it’s disappointing this perfectly restrained, funny, sad, resonant script lost the Oscar to the enjoyable but too-too glib Juno, but whatever. Go you Huskies.

This is a paid advertisement

Ads via The Deck