The Savages (2007)

Short: Two adult children, a professor, Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and a failed writer, Wendy (Laura Linney), are forced to care for their absentee father (Philip Bosco) when he develops dementia.

I remember when this movie came out people were kind of excited about a new movie from writer-director Tamara Jenkins. Turns out that I've seen her only other feature length picture: Slums of Beverly Hills. It's been a while since I've seen it, but I remember that I watched it more than once, liked it, and particularly liked Natasha Lyonne* and Maris Tomei** in it. But that was a decade ago, so I can't be certain of how good it was.

This movie, sadly, is not so good. I had high hopes, due to the cast alone, but it didn't work out. To be honest, it's all there in the title. Savage? Yeah, that's their last name. It's the kind of thing that seems clever on the surface, but the more you think about it, the less clever it becomes. You get to the "Okay, so?" moment when you contemplate it.

Linney and Hoffman are fantastic actors, and I'm pretty sure Hoffman in particular could create a fulled formed character out of thin air, but they just don't have enough to work with. Thanks to Linney, we can see Wendy trying to connect with her father, looking for some closure for whatever's gone on between them in the past, and finding that her father isn't present enough to give it to her. Wendy's really the protagonist, in that we see Wendy without Jon, but it's kind of a shame because I want to know more of Jon's story.

We never really get to know enough of any one's story, which I suppose is a point unto itself from Jenkins' script, but it hurts the finished product. There's a suggestion in the middle that their father was physically abused by his father, and another one right at the end that Jon was physically abused by their father, but we never get a sense of who their father was. As wonderful as Bosco is in what's, frankly, a thankless role, there really isn't enough of a character for us to care like we should about his deteriorating mental condition. He's less a person than a series of things that have happened to Jon and Wendy: he left them, and now that they've got him, he's gone.

There are moments, whole moments, when it seemed like Hoffman was in another, better movie, one that dug deep into life's cruel joke called growing old, into the reality of adult children caring for their dependent parents, into the horror of figuring out what to do next. I wish I could have seen that movie. It could have starred all the same people but instead of wasting time on Wendy's affair with a married man, it would have shown us Jon grading papers in a chair next to his father's bed for just a few seconds before Wendy found him there. B-

*Whatever happened to her? She's still making movies, but I feel like I haven't seen her in anything since approximately 2001.

**I love Marisa Tomei, and I kind of wish Tomei was one of those actors who used to be bigger but now has a TV show. Christian Slater's supposed to have one in the fall, for pete's sake. And if you think I wouldn't watch it just because it stars Christian Slater, you really missed the boat on that one.