The Savages

The Savages

Directed by Tamara Jenkins (R)

A brother and sister face their father’s death with humor and benevolence.

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Startlingly true to life, The Savages is a “bittersweet X-ray” of modern family dynamics, said David Ansen in Newsweek. Writer-director Tamara Jenkins, with her first film since 1998’s The Slums of Beverly Hills, explores the difficult role-reversal that occurs when children must face a parent’s looming mortality. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney play Jon and Wendy Savage, semi-estranged siblings whose father (Philip Bosco) is drifting into dementia. Two “floundering” middle-aged souls, they find themselves forced not only to deal with their father’s death but also to re-examine their own “arrested adolescence.” Jenkins lightens the bleak subject matter with her “sweet and tart sensibility,” which falls somewhere between the “compassionate satire of an Alexander Payne and the comic sang-froid of a Todd Solondz.” Her stabs at humor sometimes seem a bit predictable, said Peter Rainer in The Christian Science Monitor. Jenkins has “conveniently” created a brother and sister who are “temperamental opposites.” Wendy is a fidgety neurotic; Jon is a sluggish, self-loathing mess who seems as “unmade as his bed.” Yet the performances of Hoffman and Linney add significant depth and realism to the film, said Rex Reed in The New York Observer. Their separate interpretations of the same experience—the “trepidation, fear, exasperation, confusion, and panic”—make The Savages heart-rending but often hilarious.