The Savages
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Movie Reviews of The Savages
Movie Review: Two well-deserved Oscar nominations from the MPAA
Summary: 5 Stars
I thought writer/director Tamara Jenkins' "The Savages" was one of the best movies I saw in 2007. [I'd put it at about Number 3, behind the far-and-away best, Michael Clayton (Widescreen Edition), and Eastern Promises (Widescreen Edition).] It's nice to see the MPAA give it some well-deserved recognition yesterday with Laura Linney's Best Actress nomination and especially with Jenkins' well-deserved nod for Best Original Screenplay. You could make an equally compelling case for Philip Seymour Hoffman, who is astounding in everything he does. Since voters rarely hand out the Blanchett Double, I'll definitely take his nomination for Charlie Wilson's War. He's the best thing about that rather underwhelming release.
This is Jenkins' movie through and through. I really loved her previous effort, Slums of Beverly Hills. That was nine years ago. It's obvious that this is someone who puts huge amounts of thought and time into her work. "The Savages" is a production that will resonate deeply with anyone faced with the sudden role reversal of needing to play parent to one's mother or father. The additional layer of complexity in Jenkins' script is that Wendy and Jon Savage must fulfill that role for a father who fell far short in their lifetimes. As Hoffman's character says better than I can do here: "We're doing the right thing, Wen. We're taking better care of the old man than he ever did of us."
Movie Review: The best kind of Indie film: explores complex emotions without gimmick
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a moving journey into the lives of two very real siblings. Faced with the unexpected responsibility of dealing with a father who barely deserves their meagre emotional resources, they deal with the problem, with each other, and with their lives.
Like many people in real life, there is no simple resolution, no uplifting revelation, no emergence: they just move on to the next struggle, with some hope. It is that that makes this a first rate film, that it can be believed and experienced - and it certainly reflects what most of us know at one time or another.
Hoffman and Linney are absolutely wonderful. Their relationship is difficult and you can feel the tension that continues, even though the details are only alluded to rather than spelled out. You simply feel for them, you don't judge them or laugh at them. It is realism at its very very best. Individually, their lives are also not easy, but to say they are losers or crippled like some reviewers have here is an over-statement: like many of us, they are wounded and doing the best they can.
Then there is the father, whose behavior and sins are only to be guessed. He is a shell of a man, sometimes lucid, sometimes slipping into the kind of evil you suspect he perpetrated. Yet they still feel some love and caring for him and take their responsibilities seriously. It is a painful spectacle, but very real.
Recommended. This is a splendid journey into areas rarely covered by film, without frills or silly plot twists.
Movie Review: poignant realism. straight up, no chaser.
Summary: 5 Stars
This was a great movie. I'm a sucker for Phillip Seymour Hoffman, but as always his performance as Jon Savage lives up to his hype. Laura Linney is also choice as Jon's sister, Wendy Savage. It's no accident that she plays the female lead in another memorable movie of melancholy, "The Squid and the Whale (Special Edition)," and with this film I can finally forgive her for her excruciatingly awful Boston accent in "Mystic River (Widescreen Edition)."
As a man who has put his grandmother in a retirement home, I can testify that Hoffman's and Linney's portrayal of this awkward part of life is all too true. Luckily, the stellar script allows us some tentative laughs at the absurdities, like when Jon Savage is put in a sling attached to the ceiling and when his father does unspeakable things with feces. What is remarkable is it does this while keeping a dirty sense of realism firmly in place.
This movie is great study of human misery and discomfort, but its crowning achievement is that it's not hopeless. Throughout their ordeal, the Savage siblings bond with each other and with their father, and when the credits roll we know that in the face of everything, all is not lost.
Movie Review: Born to be savage: a life time penalty
Summary: 5 Stars
The film handles brillantly a common challenge that many of us have to face: what to do with a demented parent.
The general problem is generic, the individual circumstances vary according to our situation in life. Money helps. A functional family life helps. Benevolent geography helps.
Linney and Hoffman are among the best contemporary actors, and they give us two people with enough problems of their own, who didn't need a demented father dropping from the sky on them, which happens due to the death of his life partner. They are siblings from a 'dysfunctional' family, the father had disappeared from their life for 20 years, he is remembered as unloving and abusive, and he does behave in a way that one would not want to meet him in real life. His 'kids' are struggling middle aged intellectuals, with pityful emotional lives, but still hopeful for improvement. (You get to hear Hoffman sing a Brecht song in German; consider this a bonus.)
Some underdeveloped mind had classified this film as a 'comedy'. That was what we expected when we started watching the film, but we soon realized how far off that label is. I mention this because it gives a good contrast to one of the strong features of the film and of its characters: there is a sense of humor in the midst of sadness. The Savages definitely would have deserved at least 2 acting award nominations at the last Oscars.
Movie Review: Neurotic, sad and wonderful.
Summary: 5 Stars
Sad at times, witty and stragely funny the next. The movie is phenomenal.
The Savages are a brother and sister, that are not that close, that come together to take care of their ailing father. They must decide what to do with him considering he has dementia. They did not have the best childhood, yet they never questioned the idea that they were responsible for their father.
Laura Linney and Phillip Seymour Hoffman offer us spellbinding performances, their characters are so tightly wound, so incredibly stressed and self-contained, that unraveling their emotions is an experience onto itself.
Phillip Bosco, as Lenny Savage, the father, manages to portray a man suffering from dementia. His performance is brilliantly sad and heart breaking. The loneliness and sense of loss that this man feels radiates through this actor. He managed to perfectly capture the essense of his character and delivered it to the lens.
The movie is excellent because it offers us a very well paced movie that allows us time to contemplate the scenes rather than absorbing them as they are. It reaches into our thought process and makes us think about what is going on in the movie.