THE SAVAGES Reviewed for CompuServe by Harvey S. Karten
Fox Searchlight Pictures
Grade: B+
Directed by: Tamara Jenkins
Written By: Tamara Jenkins
Cast: Laura Linney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Philip Bosco, Peter Friedman, Gbenga Akinnagbe
Screened at: Fox, NYC, 11/7/07
Opens: November 28, 2007 If you're an only child you must be baffled–as I have always been–about how brothers and sisters can sometimes be so alienated from one another. After all, they were brought up under the same roofs, they're usually close in age, they have the same genetic material. Then again, this is a naive point of view, isn't it? After all, so many movies are about family dysfunction–and families grow up in the same households and have similar genetic materials as well. Take the Savages, for example...please! (as Rodney Dangerfield might say). They're a screwed-up three-some, but let's forget about the octagenarian oldster for a while, Lenny Savage (Philip Bosco), because he's the least interesting of the trio. Wendy Savage (played by the incomparable Laura Linney, who simply cannot make a bad movie), is a smart, adorable woman in her early forties, yet she depends for income on crummy temp jobs, stealing office supplies while knocking out regularly unpublished plays and living in a dank New York East Village apartment. She has an unsatisfactory affair with her married, older, next-door neighbor, Larry (Peter Friedman). Her desperation is all the more frustrating to her since her brother John (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a Ph.D. in Theater, has a professor's gig in Buffalo, has written several books in his field, and is on deadline for a new tome on Berthold Brecht. Still, he's as neurotic and irresponsible as his sister, allowing his three-year live-in Polish girlfriend to leave the country for good when her visa expires rather than taking the plunge and offering the ring. Word comes that Wendy and John's father, who never treated either too well and is largely responsible for their immaturity, has gone off the deep end, writing on the wall with his feces: he has dementia, which means that his two children must find a nursing home for care for him. As the three move about to place the dad in a home, brother and sister fight, while the father in one case removes his hearing aid and pulls the hood of his coat over his ears, looking mighty sad at witnessing the friction. Comedy emerges from a series of scenes, including one on a plane in which the old man embarrasses his daughter far more than himself; one in a home for assisted living where he tries to pass an admissions test; still another from Wendy's unfortunately one-sided sexual relationships with Larry. John proves to be the sibling who knows about death, as he offers a monologue about how the pretty landscapes surrounding "rehabilitation homes" are really for the visitors and not the inmates, since the latter are there to die, and death is not pleasant to look at; while Wendy may take away from time spent with her estranged brother a kind of maturity that will enable her to grow as a playwright, eventually penning a semi-autobiographical work that will get published and presented in a Manhattan theater Writer-director Tamara Jenkins, with the 1998 film "Slums of Beverly Hills" (a semi-autobiographical tale about the Abramowitz clan who move from one low-rent living space to another as the poorest residents of Beverly Hills) under her belt, knows how to elicit comedy from the most depressing themes. In this case, she squeezes laughs or at least smiles from nursing homes, assisted living centers, cemeteries, discussions of living wills, health-care professionals, a dog about to be put down, a cat who crawls under a sofa when in the presence of an imminent human death, a man who drops his pants on a passenger plane exposing a large adult diaper, and a fellow who must spend a half hour immobilized a traction unit with an eighteen-pound weight stretching his shoulders. Mott Hupfel casts the photographer's lenses ably amid the contrasting scenes in snowy Buffalo and Niagara Falls, the ironically dismal fairy-tale topography of a major American retirement community in Sun City, Arizona, and the cramped but oft-times considered hip community of Manhattan's East Village. Jenkins's comic take on dementia and death, dysfunction and tragic inevitability might alienate some in
the audience, but an intelligent, cinema-loving audience will be caught up especially by the performances of two of America's most superb performers not at the top of their game but close enough. Rated R. 114 minutes © 2007 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online | 
