At the Movies: The Savages
Abandoned in childhood by their mother, and neglected by their now-estranged father, two adult siblings find themselves forced to deal with his growing dementia and find him a rest home. Insecure, acerbic, neurotic playwright Wendy Savage (Laura Linney) and her professor brother Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman) are thrust out of their flawed isolation and into a world where they have to parent each other and their father, no easy feat for a pair of lost, middle-aged children caught in life’s current.
The result is a well-acted, well-received drama plentiful in humanity and free of sentimentality or mush. This indie production scored a solid 89% on the Rotten Tomatoes website, garnered Oscar nominations for Linney and for writer/director Tamara Jenkins (Slums of Beverly Hills).
The Savages is tailored for lovers of quirky American dramas and for everyday adults who care, have cared, or may care for any relative, aging or infirm. One older audience member said he found it poignant; he related to it because the care of his own father, a stroke victim, fell to his children for seven years.
Linney and Hoffman, both exceptionally good actors, deliver multi-textured performances, and their interplay is the highlight of the picture.
And there’s my problem. For me, it was the only highlight in a bleak tale that wasn’t exceptional, novel or fulfilling. Oddly for a film being described as a tragicomedy, or worse, “a brilliant new black comedy” (Alonso Durande, MSNBC At The Movies), it’s not even witty, not even dryly so. Just dreary. Savages? Where?
The same audience member above said it was “subtle” and “lacking something”. I left disappointed and felt I’d missed the whole point. Bored half an hour in, I took heart that neither Linney nor Hoffman would sign up for a project that wasn’t worthy in some tangible way. That worth wasn’t tangible by intermission, nor by the end. As a writing teacher I wanted the characters to evolve, to be transformed by their experience. Their evolution is microscopic and inferred, subtle to the point of redundancy.
I wanted to be in the producer’s office when this idea was pitched. What was its selling point? Why did Linney and Hoffman sign up?
Hoffman said (on American Cinematique) that there was something inside the role he was interested in exploring, and that the script was “special”.
“I love the dynamic between the siblings…There’s a real disconnect with their father figure, and I loved the idea that they were going to do something with their parent that immediately lends themselves to sentimentality because of the relationship that they don’t have with him. I thought it was unique and I’ve never seen it before. It’s probably many more people’s stories than we really know.”
Near the end of the movie, Wendy Savage asks whether her autobiographical play is too self-important and bourgeois. My alarms came on. “Ah, the movie’s autobiographical,” I clicked. Linney’s father is a playwright. Jenkins based Slums of Beverly Hills on her itinerant childhood with a dad who dragged her and her brothers between one fleapit and the next. She based much of The Savages on her experience dealing with a parent with dementia.
Autobiography is risky: A writer’s self-interest and personal attachment to their own experience can blinker them to the needs of their audience/reader. Is The Savages a case in point?
Maria Polglase
THE SAVAGES (M) Next screening at the Village Theatre, Thursday 26 March at 8.00pm.
