The Savages
Some filmmakers look down their noses at their characters; others put them on pedestals. In "The Savages," writer-director Tamara Jenkins gazes at her title siblings levelly and at arm's length. That's far enough to laugh at them and to weep for them but too close to judge them - a rare distance in American film.
Smartly written and beautifully played, "The Savages" is about that point in life where you look around and realize that where you are is probably as far as you're going to get. In spite of this, the movie's a comedy, dry and humane. With the wrong cast, it might be too sticky, but Jenkins has two of our current best: Philip Seymour Hoffman (who with "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" and his scene-stealing turn in "Charlie Wilson's War" is having a hell of a year) and Laura Linney (who hasn't had a bad year yet).
He plays Jon Savage, a woolly-bear academic (specialty: theater of social unrest) teaching in upstate New York. She plays his sister, Wendy, a tightly wound would-be playwright who works temp jobs in Manhattan while filling out grant proposals she's never, ever granted. You know these people. You probably took a course from Jon at college and remember him well, even fondly, in life's rear-view mirror. You probably befriended Wendy at work until you realized she tells small, dramatic lies about herself.
These two love each other from a distance; their bond is having survived a childhood too painful to talk about. Then their estranged father, Lenny (Philip Bosco), begins to show signs of dementia in his Arizona retirement community; never an agreeable man, he's taking to writing on the walls with his own feces. Ultimately, he has to be brought back East and placed in full-time care.
It sounds as if we're heading straight into the valley of the shadow of "Tuesdays with Morrie," but "The Savages" is too lucid for sentiment. It mines the awfulness of failing parents and faded hopes for tiny, connective bits of truth and humor: the way Wendy likes her married lover (Peter Friedman) more for his dog than for himself, or the way Jon bursts into tears whenever his Polish girl- friend (Cara Seymour) cooks him scrambled eggs.
Despite that, he's letting her go back to Poland when her visa expires; an expert on Bertolt Brecht, Jon's himself a walking alienation effect. Wendy has the misguided bathos of a woman still rebelling against her parents; she's 39 going on 17. Their father's frailty isn't just a family crisis, it's the first thing in years to snap the siblings out of their self-absorbed wallow. We all deal with this shock to our systems eventually, "The Savages" implies, and the hard truth is that we need to.
Bosco lets us see the mistreated child re-emerging from the shell of an unpleasant man; the performance is a sharp, tight work of total immersion. "The Savages" backs onto other art-house movies in resonant ways: Lenny could be Alan Arkin's grandpa in "Little Miss Sunshine" minus the saving cuteness, while Jon and Wendy recall the fraught brother and sister of "You Can Count on Me," Linney's 2000 breakthrough. (She gets the Mark Ruffalo role this time.) The film also makes an interesting companion piece to Noah Baumbach's recent "Margot at the Wedding," a broader work of emotional slapstick and a meaner one.
By comparison, Jenkins, Hoffman, and Linney are miniaturists, and when the big laughs come along - a disastrous retirement home screening of "The Jazz Singer," a chiropractic emergency involving Jon - they're delivered with a lovely finesse. Other moments will be recognized as honest in their quiet ugliness by anyone who has had to deal with a parent's decline. "The Savages" knows the smell of hospitals.
Movies end differently than lives do, though, which is where Jenkins trips up. The film's final scenes give the characters a closure that feels wholly forced, as if whatever small wisdom the Savages have picked up along the way were getting a matching grant from Hollywood. The misstep is understandable, a big, beribboned present from a filmmaker who loves her characters as much as we've come to. A tougher artist would know the story itself is the gift.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog.
Video
