In Tara Jenkins’ film, Laura Linney plays the woman I always feared I would become if I continued to be an aspiring actor/playwright past the point of it being cute. Because of this, I personally found this comedy to be more of a horror film, but regardless, I enjoyed it.
Wendy Savage is a 30-something aspiring playwright who lives in Manhattan, pretends to work in a cube all day, and occassionally has bad sex with an unattractive married man. Her brother, Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman), is a lit professor in a small New England town, continually working on an unreadable book on Bertold Brecht. When their father, Lenny’s (Philip Bosco) long-term girlfriend dies and her children throw him out of her house, Wendy and Jon must place Lenny (who has dementia) in a facility. Lenny was abusive, and the Savage children have been estranged from him for decades, but family responsibility trumps all, and they dutifully situate him in a nursing home near Jon’s school, and visit him frequently, trying to make him as comfortable as possible in his new surroundings.
The world in The Savages feels depressingly, hilariously recognizable. Its people are floundering and bored, and their triumphs are small. Wendy continually attempts to make lemonade out of life’s lemons. She decorates her father’s institutional-looking nursing home room with Urban Outfitters throw pillows and lampshades, which details are then ignored by everyone but her; she manages to win a writers’ grant…from FEMA; she doesn’t much like her boyfriend, but she loves his dog. But by the end of the film, her obstinate attempts at reinterpreting her life as something worth living have begun to work out for her, and The Savages ends on as uplifting a note as possible, while sustaining its credibility.
The movie is touching without sentiment, familiar but original, and very funny without being forced. Jenkins underscores her well-drawn characters and simple plot with subtle visual metaphors, and her screenplay is economical – there are no superfluous scenes or bits here, nothing added just for the fun of it. The Savages is so well-written, in fact, that it would have made a fine novella, but happily, it is an even better film.
