"The Savages"
(March 2008)
Online Copy

The Savages – a film by Tamara Jenkins – is kind of like post-9-11 Edward Hopper. This is a story of two smart, lonely, middle-aged kids trying to take care of their declining, distant father. It’s a story of retirement homes, health care professionals, and DNR procedures, of prescription meds, support groups, and coping with senility.

The children are Wendy (Laura Linney) and Jon (Phillip Seymour Hoffman). She’s a temp with aspirations of becoming a playwright. He’s a professor of theatre, working on a book about Brecht. They have to come together and take care of their once-abusive father after his girlfriend dies and he shows signs of dementia.

The Savages is bleak. Its black humor makes you laugh out of self-defense. It’s a series of cringing embarrassments and sad clichés – but ones the literate characters are self-conscious of. It’s the despair of when a self-centered life is disoriented by obligation and filial duty.

It has the irony of a David Hockney portrait – a tacky American wasteland of Days Inns, rental cars, and desert golf course subdivisions. The film often references theater of the absurd, and we have to wonder, too, whether euphemisms, anxiety meds, and life projects can really overcome self-obsessed ennui and apathetic family bonds.

Linney’s role is much like that from The Squid and the Whale – an earnest, creative woman desperately seeking an authentic life. While Hoffman’s is a lighter, more intellectual version of his role from Before the Devil Knows Your Dead – a self-important depressive, trying to dispose of life as if a stain on a shirt. Phillip Bosco plays the fated father, Lenny, with a kind of anxious, frustrated oblivion.

Watching The Savages can be painful, if not because of what’s happening to the characters, then because of your own schadenfreude reaction to it. It is utter American realism, sparing us only a few milligrams of redemptive hope and absurd humor to relieve us from the desolation of bourgeois egoism.


©2009 Tim Peters/All rights reserved