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The Savages 15
SCREENINGS The Savages is an irreverent look at family, love and mortality as seen through the lens of one of modern life's most bewildering and challenging experiences: when adult siblings find themselves plucked from their everyday, self-centred lives to care for an estranged elderly parent. The last thing the two Savage siblings ever wanted to do was look back at their difficult family history. Having wriggled their way out from beneath their father's domineering thumb, they are now firmly cocooned in their own complicated lives. Wendy (Laura Linney) is a struggling playwright, AKA a temp who spends her days applying for grants, stealing office supplies and dating her very married neighbour. Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a neurotic college professor writing books on obscure subjects in Buffalo. Then comes the call that informs them that the father they have long feared and avoided, Lenny Savage (Philip Bosco) is slowly being consumed by dementia and they are the only ones that can help. Now as they put their lives on hold, Wendy and Jon are forced to live together under one roof for the first time since childhood, rediscovering the eccentricities that drove each other crazy. Faced with complete upheaval and battling over how to handle their father's final days, they are confronted with what adulthood, family and most surprisingly, each other, are really about. BBFC advice: Contains strong language and sex references "For the third time this month [January 2008] there's a film featuring an outstanding performance from the shambling, sensitive Philip Seymour Hoffman, a specialist at finding the vulnerable, sympathetic side of initially unattractive people. In The Savages he plays Jon Savage, a self-centred 42-year-old university professor working on an unnecessary book on Bertholt Brecht to retain his academic status. Very reluctantly he joins his unmarried young sister Wendy (Laura Linney), a struggling unperformed playwright working as a temp, in taking care of their remote, octogenarian father (Philip Bosco) when he develops vascular dementia. It's socially and psychologically well observed (an awful senior citizens' city in Arizona and various old folks' homes in Upper New York State are sharply evoked), and the performances are beyond reproach. Linney has rightly been Oscar-nominated and Hoffman could have been... " "... Eschewing broad strokes and primary colours, Jenkins draws on memories of her own father’s dementia to construct a dark and gritty comedy about families, senility, loneliness and mortality, centred around two troubled lead characters. Jon is an insular, ill-kempt theatre professor out in the minor-league greyness of Buffalo, NY; Wendy a nervy, unfulfilled Manhattan temp still trying to make it as a playwright. Both are stuck, like their Peter Pan namesakes, in a childish Neverland. Linney and Hoffman have played similar characters before, but never with such care and delicacy. The scene where they share a ratty tuna melt, while Hoffman is immobilised by a makeshift chin-sling attached to the bedroom door, is both a perfect comic vignette and a glimpse of two locked-down souls finally connecting. While no film about parental care set in the depths of a Buffalo winter is ever going to have the belly-laughs of Knocked Up, The Savages makes a virtue of its sidetracked setting, finding scuffed humour in the minutiae of human life, so that when the laughs do come they feel profound, jagged and real. A richly nuanced American comedy, with two acting talents working at their absolute peak."
UK RELEASE 25 January 2008
DIRECTOR Tamara Jenkins
CAST Laura Linney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Philip Bosco, Peter Friedman, Gbenga Akinnagbe
RUNNING TIME 113 minutes
COUNTRY USA
official film website
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