The Savages

Reviewed by:
Pete Hammond

Deceptively simple, yet quite complex on the inside, this Sundance hit will have a lot of audience members seeing themselves in the heart of an all-too-familiar family story. Sister and brother Wendy (Laura Linney) and Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman), must put aside their sibling rivalries long enough to figure out what to do with their aging father (Philip Bosco), who is showing signs of dementia. They travel together to Arizona's Sun City where he livesand must jointly find a way to get him into a living-assistance home that can handle his rapidly diminishing capacities. The one they discover is in bleak Buffalo, but while dealing with dad's sad situation, they realize their own ability to exist together and apart is being taxed as well. Linney is particularly good here as a woman who takes temp jobs in order to pursue her own wild dreams of writing success. Her lonely existence is accentuated in scenes involving her key companion, which happens to be a cat, and her frustrating relationship with a married man. Hoffman is a bit of a goof who has his own woes with a Polish woman he is in no mood to marry. Clearly the siblings have issues going back to childhood when their mother abandoned them. But now the man who brought them up alone is the helpless child, and they must somehow put aside their own insecurities to help him face an inevitable death with his (and their) dignity intact. The film, written and directed with compassion by Tamara Jenkins, successfully navigates the tricky waters of family dysfunction, rising to the surface with a savagely funny/tragic/hopeful portrait of the way we are circa 2007.