Review: The Savages

* * * *

Laura Linney, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Phillip Bosco, Peter Friedman. Written and Directed by Tamara Jenkins. Rated R. 113 minutes. Fox Searchlight Pictures.

A biting human comedy tackling some ambitious subjects, writer-director Tamara Jenkins’ The Savages—featuring Laura Linney and Phillip Seymour Hoffman as adult siblings navigating mid-life crises when confronted with a demented father—is easily one of the smartest and best acted films of 2007.

The film opens in Sun City, Arizona, where aging Lenny Savage (Phillip Bosco) suffers the death of long-term girlfriend and commits an unfortunate "toileting incident" that lands him in a hospital. Enter the estranged, East Coast children he did a poor job of raising following their mother’s abandonment decades prior.

Daughter and Manhattan temp Wendy (Linney), 39, pilfers office supplies while pursuing grants to fund a play based on her troubled childhood, devoted to workout videos and a fichus tree yet less so to her older, married neighbor (Peter Friedman). Son Jon (Hoffman), 42, a theater professor in Buffalo, is finishing a book on Brecht and dumping love Kasia (Cara Seymour), a Polish immigrant on an expired visa whom he loves deeply but is not ready to marry, crying each time she cooks him eggs for breakfast.

Arriving in Sun City, the reluctant pair is surprised to discover their father, suffering from vascular dementia, is suddenly homeless—his girlfriend’s family wants him out of the house they now own. Practical Jon returns to Buffalo, securing a third-rate retirement home, leaving Wendy the task of transporting their confused father to New York. In these initial scenes, both Linney and Hoffman inhabit their edgy characters with a real sense of passive-aggressive tension, bickering as Wendy lectures Jon about how "people dress up when someone dies" and Jon, after leaving frightened Wendy to handle logistics, counters with "Now is not the time to regress."

The fireworks between the two actors are pitch-perfect in an argument following a botched care facility interview, illustrating the divide between Jon’s realism regarding eldercare wastelands and the guilt driving Wendy to find a comfortable situation for their father. Jenkins superbly chronicles the depressing process of finding a "home" for a loved one and in a tense moment, Wendy tears a pillow bought for dad from the arms of another wheelchair-ridden resident: "That’s not yours," she shouts before returning it to her father, who then mistakes her for the hired help. Her sense of helplessness in this scene recalls Shirley MacLaine’s hospital tantrum in Terms of Endearment: "Give my daughter the shot!"

And then there is a touchy scene in a restaurant where Jenkins mounts the most difficult conversation—the siblings asking their father how he wishes to he disposed of—with an uncommon directness. There are many scenes like this in The Savages, which are uncomfortably, sometimes frighteningly—real, including a wonderful confrontation between Linney and Friedman where he explains that at her age, she is "no student" and is "betraying herself," a greater sin than his dishonesty to his own wife.

It’s this kind of fair play and ear-opening discussion that makes The Savages so compelling. A less confident filmmaker would have gone for sentiment. But Jenkins, as demonstrated in her underrated 1998 debut Slums of Beverly Hills, is a master surveyor of realism, defined here by prickly exchanges and uncomfortable realizations. The film works on multiple levels as the family crisis reveals the bitter pills of middle-aged unhappiness just around the corner for both Wendy and Jon.

Linney, particularly, is magnificent here, wound up tightly, too smart for her circumstances and layering Wendy with a caustic wit, whether lying about cervical problems to get out of sex or lying about a grant from the Guggenheim to impress her older brother. And Hoffman, painfully vulnerable yet straight shooting, has moments of touching sensitivity while crying on the telephone with Kasia, and an unblinking, unsentimentality in the face of mortality. Both actors possess a crusading intelligence that, combined with two original and recognizable modern characters, exponentially increases the depth of their scenes together.

The Savages, with its superb performances and deeply felt screenplay, is one of the year’s most satisfying films, and a perfect character comedy of uncommon pain and pathos.

- Lee Shoquist