This has been the year of acting versatilely for Laura Linney. First she was an FBI agent in "Breach." Then she was the hilariously hateful Mrs. X in "The Nanny Diaries." In her latest movie, "The Savages," which opens Friday, Linney plays an aspiring playwright who might most charitably be described as existentially challenged. Oh, and she recently finished filming an HBO adaptation of David McCullough's "John Adams" (Linney plays Abigail Adams).
Of course, in the decade or so since "Primal Fear," where Linney first began to draw attention, every year for her has been a year of acting versatilely.
"She's a great actress," says Tamara Jenkins, who wrote and directed "The Savages," in a telephone interview from Los Angeles. Linney is "a character actress, but she grew up being an ingenue. She has this enormous versatility."
Linney, 43, was in Boston recently to promote "The Savages." She co- stars in the film with Philip Seymour Hoffman. They play estranged sib lings who have to come together to deal with the declining health of their elderly father (Philip Bosco).
Wendy, Linney's character, works as an office temp and dreams of seeing her plays produced. She's also involved in a dead-end affair with a married stage director. Hoffman's character, Jon, is more successful professionally - he's a theater professor - but not all that much more further along emotionally.
In person, Linney little resembles Wendy. Elegantly yet simply dressed in sweater, skirt, and high-cut boots, she's utterly at ease. She's the rare celebrity who turns an interview into a conversation. Whenever an answer seems to be turning rote, she'll pause, roll her eyes, and draw back from it. As someone so good at reciting others' lines, she visibly enjoys the opportunity of coming up with some of her own.
Wendy, Linney says, is "a very immature person who's put in a position where she has to be mature. And sometimes she lives up to it, and sometimes she doesn't."
Jenkins says that it was Linney's ability to hit both Wendy's highs and lows that made her ideal for the part. "It was so important to me that whoever played Wendy has to be able to be a girl-woman. There's something very present in Laura that she could straddle the humor and pathos at the same time. She really has that capacity."
Linney admits to mixed feelings about Wendy - which isn't necessarily a bad thing, since so many of her most memorable performances have been of mixed characters. Think of her loving yet resentful sister in "You Can Count on Me" (for which she earned a best actress Oscar nomination) or as Sean Penn's wife in "Mystic River."
In fact, Linney says, her personal opinion of a character is irrelevant.
"It's not important at all. I don't think I'd like Wendy if I knew her. She's quirky and immature. She's a combination of things. She's profoundly narcissistic yet capable of tremendous empathy. She's spastic and manic and capable of great stillness. She's just all over the place. She lies, she cheats, she steals, but in a way that you forgive, like a 6-year-old. There's an innocence behind the deceptions. It's coming from a place of wanting to be liked."
What drew Linney to "The Savages," she says, was the script.
"This script was in perfect shape, perfect," Linney says. "There are a lot of scripts these days that are written to be greenlit. They're written to be financed. They're not written to be performed. A script is really a blueprint or sheet music. It's a starting point. But people who deal with this sort of interpretation all the time, we can see through it like a chess player can see through a defense. We can see where it's going to go: the structure, the topography, the rhythm."
Linney's mention of chess recalls a scene in "The Savages" that involves another form of competition, tennis. The scene sets up a plot development involving Hoffman's health. But in a larger sense, it provides a metaphor for two such skilled actors volleying back and forth over the course of the movie's 113-minute running time.
Playing with an actor of Hoffman's, or Bosco's, ability "gives you a freedom that things can really start to happen," Linney says. "I loved my two Phils. I loved them, loved them dearly. And acting with Phil Hoffman was just such a relief. There's an enormous relief when you work with someone of that caliber. Because as hard as you throw the ball they throw it right back at you. And there's a delight to the work, because it goes to a whole other level.
"I had a similar sort of affinity or closeness to Mark Ruffalo [in 'You Can Count on Me'] and to Liam Neeson [in 'Kinsey'] and to Jeff Daniels [in 'The Squid and the Whale'] and to Sean Penn. When you're working with actors of that level, it really is fun. And when the scripts are good it's very easy. When the scripts are bad, that's when it's difficult."
A naturally enthusiastic person, Linney comes across as good humored, vigorous, vividly engaged. When the subject turns to acting, she grows even more animated. It's a topic she warms to - and has thought about long and hard. It's something too important to allow for either false modesty or bravado.
"There are those of us who are good, then there are the touched ones, the ones who live on another planet. I would say Sean Penn, Meryl Streep, Daniel Day-Lewis, Judi Dench - those are the ones off the top of my head - they're on a whole other level. They've made connections within themselves that allow them to have an understanding of the medium that the rest of us just don't have, and maybe never will have."
Linney, a two-time nominee for both an Oscar and a Tony, is the rare actress who goes back and forth between leading roles on stage and on screen. "The film work makes the theater work better, and the theater work makes the film work better," she says.
Which makes her current situation, in her early 40s, all the more interesting. That's a perilous age for a film actress, and an exciting one for a stage actress. Asked how that feels, Linney bridles slightly. The asperity is amiable, but definitely there.
"I feel excited. Other people seem to be very afraid for me," she says with a laugh. "Particularly journalists. Almost every journalist I speak to now, that's a major topic. It's interesting: As opposed to saying, 'Oh hurray, you're getting better,' it's 'Oh boy, you might expire soon.' It's an odd cultural thing.
"It depends on what people are talking about. What are they really talking about? That I'm not going to go make millions of dollars in movies? I don't need millions of dollars. I'm not losing anything. Every once in a while I get a really nice job. I make little movies. Then I go to the theater. As long as I'm still working, and growing," Linney's voice trails off, and she shrugs.
"To concentrate on anything other than just getting better - the other side of the business, the part that's other than the work - I'd be doomed. I really would. And you also learn. You're just a constant student. So I feel really young!" She breaks into a cackle. "And the more I learn the younger I feel. The more I learn the more I realize I don't know."
Now she's beaming, that well-scrubbed, slightly mischievous Laura Linney grin. "It's a great life. What can I say? It doesn't feel like work."
Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.
