Rating: ****Something about The Savages appeals on a level you can only connect with if you have a sibling. That love them and hate them dynamic that makes you appreciate someone for their support but deride them for being a pain in your butt, while realizing that at once you both need them and would sometimes do anything to be rid of them. Sad but true. The battling Savages are the epitome of this in Tamara Jenkins’ tragicomedy of (nearly) the same name. Anchored by three great performances, The Savages will make you laugh, make you cry and maybe just even appreciate those people that share your last name and a deep-seeded, familial connection.
The story follows John and Wendy Savage (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney), two highly dysfunctional people that credit their lack of functioning to their verbally abusive father, Lenny (Philip Bosco). John is a theatre professor in Upstate New York whose Polish girlfriend is leaving the country after her visa expired, much to his disinterest. Wendy is a corporate drone dating a married man while struggling to remake herself as a playwright. They’re both forced to confront their father and their past when Lenny’s girlfriend dies and he’s unable to care for himself anymore. Moving him closer to home, from Arizona to New York, old tensions and old arguments resurface as John and Wendy must deal with the pending death of their father and the remains of his legacy.
If you like bittersweet tales of family dysfunction like Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale or the works of Wes Anderson or Alexander Payne, then The Savages is your type of bitter pill to swallow. As I said, it’s anchored by three excellent performances by three workhorse actors that never really disappoint. But working together here, Hoffman, Linney and Bosco and truly make you believe the wellspring of resentment that’s the undercurrent of the story’s emotion. Hoffman ably shows off his ability to feign disinterest as another smarter-than-thou academic. Linney is really understated and reserved in what could have been a really shrill and disagreeable part, while Bosco plays Lenny as a guy trying to cover-up a much deeper poisonous nature that he really just can’t hide.
Aside from the melancholy nature of the characters, Jenkins really works the setting to add greater and almost overwhelming bleakness to the affair. The desolate winter of Buffalo is captured in all it’s glory and manipulated through interesting camera work to magnify the isolation of the characters; as if the winterscape is a manifestation of the Savages' foulness. But aside from the great cinematography and Mise-en-scène, Jenkins is particularly savage (heh) with how the characters treat each other. It can be rather unflinching in how these supposed family member acts towards one and other, but somehow both the actors and Jenkins manage to convey the love as well.
It really is quite impressive how easily you get sucked up. The Savages has really a barebones kind of script that plumbs very current issues of child’s responsibility to their parents later in life and how the love between them is sometimes not something easy to come by or explained easily. With the compelling acting and the very realistic, vérité style of filmmaking, Jenkins overcomes what could have amounted to “Movie of the Week” style histrionics and jabs us with the unflinching truth of the emotions. There are quite a few opportunities for laughter in The Savages, but these are usually followed by a pause. Somewhere between comedy and tragedy is real life, and The Savages really captures that.
