Movie Review: The Savages
By: Source: AARP The Magazine Date Posted:
Despite Hollywood's infatuation with youth, half of movie tickets are bought by people over 30. "Youth-oriented movies make or break themselves on their opening weekends," says Movies for Grownups® host Bill Newcott. "But three of the highest-grossing movies of all time—the grownup-oriented My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Dances with Wolves, and A Beautiful Mind—never reached number one at the box office. How did they manage that success? It was thanks to mature audiences, who kept those movies in the theaters for months."
December 2007
The Savages (R)
****
Four out of Five Stars
"We are horrible, horrible people," cries Wendy Savage (Laura Linney) in the parking lot of her father's new nursing home. "Horrible, horrible, horrible people." But in this deft, dark comedy, committing her father, a dementia patient, to fairly congenial care isn't the worst of it. What's really horrible is that her partner in this decision, her older brother, Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman), cannot comfort her. Instead, he stands stiffly beside her in the frigid air, his eventual attempt at a hug rebuffed.
Both siblings in The Savages are achingly awkward, though in different ways. Wendy temps and writes unproduced plays; Jon is a theater professor perpetually at work on a Bertolt Brecht bio. Neither has a family. Their psychological growth, it seems, was stunted by their depressive mother and abusive father. But the siblings are jarred from their mildly dysfunctional, self-centered lives to care for their estranged father, played by Broadway legend Philip Bosco, perhaps best known to TV audiences as a judge on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
Though they're both around 40, Jon and Wendy's childhood rivalry is always gnawing at the edges of their conversations. And these characters are played by two of the best film actors working today: Hoffman has one Oscar already and Linney has two nominations. Their performances ring so true that, as the story unfolds, you almost begin to worry what will become of their characters after the film is over.
The father's fate, on the other hand, is not in doubt. With spitting-mad outbursts and the occasional sad smile, Bosco touchingly embodies the slow acceptance of his diminished powers—though he doesn't recognize, as one might hope he would, the damage his earlier actions have done to his children. Still, the grudging affection the siblings show each other as they struggle with their shared burden seems to afford their father a measure of forgiveness. And in the process, the brother and sister take baby steps towards becoming more compassionate and connected people than their deeply flawed parents could have shown them how to be.
(Review by Margaret Guroff)
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