via Atlas Film
By Daniel Greenwood
This review is unsure of itself.
Here is a dour though accurate portrayal of the strife between two adult siblings, underwritten by the decay of their demented father. Two fine actors compete here as brother and sister - Philip Seymour Hoffman as Jon Savage, Laura Linney as Wendy Savage - a simmering feud that amounts to a tally of who is the more selfish. Jon is a lecturer in the midst of writing a book about Bertolt Brecht, the great dramatist, while Wendy ‘temps for money’ and is a ‘theatre person’ in her spare time. Their father Lenny (Philip Bosco) is left in their care after the death of his girlfriend, and the painful procedure of selecting a home for him to effectively die in haunts The Savages. Both Wendy and Jon are middle-aged and single, though they each flirt with marital commitment: Jon with a Polish intellectual whose visa runs out, and Wendy with a married theatre director who arrives on her doorstep in search of sex. ‘Why don’t you marry her?’ Wendy asks of Jon’s departing lover, but Jon’s perhaps too much a cynic, or too much the purist to marry tactically.
This is a well-shot film, and with Seymour Hoffman and Linney on screen it’s very watchable. But it’s terribly unhappy, too. The inner-city scenes are akin to those of Michel Gondry’s American romantic movies such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, though lacking the childlike innocence of a woolgathering Jim Carrey. Arizona is where Mr. Savage - Lenny - has to be collected from and it’s presented as a sunburnt suburb where elderlies drive golf carts in the streets, where the glare of the sun is mind-numbing. On the other hand you have Boston where much of the story takes place, and where Jon and Wendy find a new home for their father. Boston is a dark, wintry place, and drained of all colour there’s not a speck of sunlight let alone an Arizonian glare.
It’s ok to make a film depressing, I’m totally OK with that but there has to be a release. I’m not talking about a camp-as-Christmas Life is Beautiful (Roberto Benigni, 1997) comedy-holocaust release. Just brief moments to lighten the gloom. I believe there is a basic, if not fundamental sense of humour in a person, if not in me. And that’s what costs The Savages some of the richness it tries to achieve. It’s that these characters are building up so much stress but things never really boil over. If things fail to explode it’s because of intermittent moments of comedy, but they ain’t here! Perhaps The Savages doesn’t lack a sense of humour but wit instead. In Laura Linney you have an actress who deals in self-deprecating comedy, The Squid and the Whale (Noah Baumbach, 2005) for example. But in parts this self-deprecation becomes unsavoury wretchedness (I suppose that’s pretty rich coming from me, Interiors is a current favourite of mine). It just feels like what Tamara Jenkins has tried to do with these characters comes off a bit sulky, unrealistic in Wendy’s case. It may even lack the beauty of real tragedy, you know.
What troubles me after watching The Savages is that I don’t know what’s wrong with it, there just is something wrong with it. That’s the ultimate failure of a review of any kind, never mind the film: there’s something you don’t like about it, but, er, dunno what that is. Perhaps this cold film suffers because it has such a monstrous, actorly-duo in Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney. These siblings are savages, and they star-the-hell-out-of this savagely glum movie.
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