The Savages (2007)

This is the most depressing movie I have seen all year. I say this not a criticism, but as a fact. The reason why it is so depressing is because it gets so many things right. Written and directed by Tamara Jenkins, it seems like she must have had time with these characters in therapy grab their essence so well. Of course, Laura Linney, who is best being crazy but fragile, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who is brilliantly flawed, are perfect for their roles.

Linney plays Wendy a 39 year old over-educated woman working as a temp in New York City. Not sure how she pays the rent. She is in a small apartment with a foldout bed. She is in an unhealthy almost totally sexual relationship with a married man 13 years older than her. She is functionally sad.

Her brother, the Hoffman character, is an obese professor living Buffalo, who receives a hysterical phone call from his sister that their estranged father is in trouble. He seems to be used adding a rational counter-balance to his sister’s emotions. Later in film we learn that he is emotionally withdrawn, and cries at inopportune moments, such as when eating eggs. He is 42 years and claims to not be ready for marriage as his Polish girlfriend of three years goes back to Poland after her visa expires. Ever the rationalist his decisions lack an emotional compass.

Both characters seem so typical in real life.

When we meet the father we get a sense of the children’s backgrounds growing up with an emotionally and physically abusive father. There mother was completely out of the picture.

The father is living in Arizona with his girlfriend who just past away, and now he has no place to live. He is no longer able to care for himself.

The process of the health-care industry, the emotional drama of picking up the pieces of a life and ship it to place where they will die, was done is extreme accuracy. The moments of packing up their father’s pocessions, finding a nursing home, dealing with the staff, taking the loved one out to a restaurant to get out for a moment, it is all too real. So much so that it could be training for adults with older parents. I couldn’t help thinking will I have to do that.

At the very end, there is a little hope, maybe.

When I saw them film, in the audience were senior citizens in crowd who seemed offended that people were laughing at the plight of life at the nursing home. I guess for them it wasn’t funny. Actually, I didn’t think much was funny in the film, unless it was tragically funny. There was a seen where they were playing a scene from the Jazz Singer (1928), where Al Jolson was putting on back-face. The movie was a film the father picked out, and pained expressions on his children faces was funny if you can relate in someway.