The Savages

Wendy Savage (Laura Linney) lives in New York City, making ends meet as a temp while she struggles as a playwright. She’s hitting middle-aged, single but with a married neighbouring boyfriend, and wondering sacrifices she’s made to her writing ambitions will ever pay off. Her brother Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman) lives in Buffalo. He works as a drama teacher while he prepares a book on Bertolt Brecht. His Polish girlfriend Kasia (Cara Seymour) is about to return to her native country as her visa has expired and, in his words, they’re “not ready for marriage”.

Meanwhile, their elderly father Lenny (Philip Bosco) is living with his common-law wife of twenty years in a retirement community in Arizona. When she suddenly dies, and Lenny shows signs of senility, sister and brother have to face up to doing the best by their father.

At the end of 1998, I caught Tamara Jenkins’s debut feature, Slums of Beverly Hills on its limited British release. An attractive, insightful comedy-drama about a dysfunctional family, with fine performances by Natasha Lyonne and Alan Arkin, it was a very likeable and clearly talented work that slipped under most people’s radar. I’ve been waiting nine years for Jenkins to follow it up, and now she has. The Savages is an excellent follow-up, as tartly witty as Slums was, but it cuts a little deeper too. It’s nominated for two Oscars, for Laura Linney as Best Actress and Jenkins for her screenplay. Both of these are very well deserved, and Hoffman should perhaps have earned a nod as well if he wasn’t already nominated elsewhere.

Senile dementia is hardly the most inviting subject matter – it features in another Oscar nominee, Away from Her as well – and Jenkins does not fall into the trap of making fun of it. Even a scene where Lenny is caught short on a plane flight and his trousers fall down revealing an adult nappy is dealt with in a discreet long shot. This is a character-driven story about two middle-aged people facing up to what they most value in life. Wendy struggles with her self-esteem and her lack of success, sensing that her distinguished older brother really doesn’t think she has much talent. Meanwhile, Jon is adept at not facing up to his emotions and is willing to let the love of his life, a woman who clearly loves him, slip through his fingers.

To say that a film starring Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman is superbly acted is stating the obvious. Hoffman confirms his status as one of the finest character actors of his generation, while Linney works wonders with her role, bringing us firmly in sympathy with a woman who in other hands could easily have become simply neurotic. Philip Bosco is excellent too. A flaw of Slums was that the male characters were underwritten compared to the females (though since the reverse is so often true, you can hardly complain). While Wendy is clearly the central character – as was Natasha Lyonne’s Vivian in Slums - Jenkins does provide some nuanced secondary characters such as Peter Friedman as Wendy’s boyfriend and Gbenga Akinnagbe as a nurse at the retirement home.

As a director, Jenkins tends towards the self-effacing, not distracting attention from her script and the actors. At just under two hours, The Savages is a little too long – the midsection could probably be trimmed a bit – but it’s a proper grown-up film and a delight. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait another nine years for Tamara Jenkins’s next film.