The Savages, He Said

Wendy and Jon Savage, Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman are stuck in their own versions of hell. He is a professor of drama in a University in Buffalo, New York. He is writers blocked on a paper he has been trying to get published for a long time. He is in love with a Polish woman, whose visa is running out and hasn't got the confidence to ask her to marry him. Wendy is working as a temp in Manhattan. She is trying to get her stage play produced. Her sex life consists on trysts with a married man who is much older than she is.

Wendy gets a call from a woman on the West Coast. Their father has been diagnosed with dementia. More to the point the women he was living with has died and her family don't want to have anything to do with him, but than neither do Wendy and Jon. It becomes clear quickly that the two of them wrote off their abusive father years ago, but at this point he has no one else to turn to. With a sense of duty, if not love and concern, they both travel to Arizona only to find that not only is he with out friends he has no resources. He had been sponging off his girlfriend for years. Jonflys back to Buffalo to find a rest home for the old guy. Wendy stays to clear out her dad's belongings and escort him back to Buffalo.

Once he is safely ensconced in the rest home, Jon talks Wendy into staying with him for awhile. It is in this time that the structure of the family and the dis-functionality is revealed to us. Jon and Wendy are at once supportive and competitive with each other. Their memory of how bad it was with Dad in their youth is different but neither version is pretty. Jon tends to be the more practical of the two and Wendy is the more sympathetic. What evolves is the kind of disagreements, guilt trips and fantasy exercises that occurs daily as people try and figure out what to do with their aging and ailing parents.

Linny and Hoffman are magnificent as the barely functioning survivors of something that might be called a family, but was really only real in the biological sense. They struggle with their own lives and try and leave something left over for their father who seems to deserve none of what they work so hard to give him. Their fathers interment and eventual death does little for their relationship with him, but a huge amount for the relationship they have as the realization that they are the only family they have left and to squander it would be folly.

The script and direction by Tamara Jenkins is excellent and overall the fact that she could get these two outstanding actors along with Philip Bosco to do this film says volumes about her talent. This is a must see film.