DARKLY hilarious, Tamara Jenkins’ “The Savages” captures the cruel demographic joke facing many boomers who are forced to take care of aging parents at a point when they haven’t entirely figured out their own lives.
As their Peter Pan-inspired names more than hint, 40-ish self-absorbed siblings Wendy and Jon Savage – mildly estranged and intensely jealous of each other – haven’t quite grown up.
Wendy (played by an Oscar-worthy Laura Linney) is a failed playwright who works as an office temp, steals supplies, incessantly pops pills, lies and is carrying on a longtime affair with a married neighbor (Peter Friedman) in Manhattan.
Jon (a sublime Philip Seymour Hoffman), a rumpled college professor in Buffalo, is struggling to complete a book on Bertolt Brecht. He’s so emotionally stunted he stands by helplessly as the girlfriend he loves heads home to Poland.
As happens sooner or later to many middle-age children, they start getting calls that dramatically change their lives.
Their dad, Lenny (the great character actor Philip Bosco), whom neither sibling has seen in years, is sinking into dementia and writing in feces on the walls of his longtime girlfriend’s condo in Sun City, Ariz.
And shortly after that, the girlfriend dies, forcing the siblings to bring a parent they loathe and fear in equal measure back to Buffalo.
This may not sound like the stuff of comedy, but those of us who have been on this journey – Jenkins, who directed “Slums of Beverly Hills” a decade ago, clearly has – know that there’s plenty of gallows humor in a situation that often seems like a never-ending theater of the absurd.
“We are not in a Sam Shepard play,” Jon tells Wendy during one of their many arguments, which include an ongoing battle over what sort of facility would be most appropriate for the old man.
Jon, the pragmatist, chooses a cheerless nursing home.
Wendy, who has temporarily moved into Jon’s squalid home, wants to move Lenny to a more upscale rehab center.
In a tragically funny scene, Wendy fruitlessly tries to coach the old man to qualify for the latter. (Noticing the interviewer is using a pen promoting Xanax, she boasts to the nonplused nursing home supervisor that she takes it.)
Lenny doesn’t say much, but Bosco’s minimalist performance beautifully suggests the roots of the siblings’ dysfunction.
It seems even if Lenny was in full command of his faculties, he’d still be insensitive enough to choose “The Jazz Singer” for showing at the nursing home – while his son cringes at the largely African-American staff’s reactions to Al Jolson’s blackface scenes.
Hoffman and Linney totally convince you they’re siblings, especially when the jealous Jon confronts Wendy about a grant. But Hoffman generously allows Linney to occupy the film’s center in her strongest and most endearing performance since “You Can Count on Me.”
There isn’t an ounce of sentimentality in Linney’s love-starved Wendy, whether she’s sneaking out for a quickie with her lover in a Niagara Falls motel or haplessly flirting with a Nigerian worker (Gbenga Akinnagbe) at dad’s nursing home.
I would have ended “The Savages” just before the final scene, but that doesn’t mean I don’t treasure a movie that depicts transformative real-life events in such a wise and witty manner.
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THE SAVAGES
You can’t count on them.
Running time: 113 minutes. Rated R (sex, profanity). At the Lincoln Plaza and the Angelika.