Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
A
Pause in God's Waiting Room
(The Savages, 2/11/08)
By Nicholas Nicastro
If
humanoids of the distant future ever watch our movies, they will gather
the following about us: 1) there are few middle-aged women in our society,
2) males tend to get kicked in the gonads a lot, and 3) all our families
are dysfunctional. Tamara Jenkins' The Savages will do little
to counter impression #3, but at least it suggests we had a sense of
humor about it.
Wendy and Jon Savage (Laura Linney
and Philip Seymour Hoffman) are siblings who, since adulthood, haven't
had much of a relationship. They've shared even less with their father
Lenny (Philip Bosco), an abuser who was emotionally absent long before
he retired to Arizona with his long-time girlfriend. When the latter
dies, Wendy and Jon are forced to deal with their father for the first
time in decades. Arriving in the land of big cactuses and golf carts,
they find him half-demented, incontinent, but still making the gruff
noises of a patriarch. Most of the story involves how the Savages contrive
to care for a difficult father who never cared much for them.
The script (also by Jenkins) is
unsparing in its portrayal of the indignities of old age. Bosco, who
never gets a lucid moment in the film, loses his pants (but not his
adult diaper) on the plane trip back to Buffalo; at first, he insists
that the staff of his retirement home be tipped as if it is a hotel.
He shows not a flicker of interest in Jon's career as a English professor,
nor Wendy's work as an aspiring playwright. Fittingly, the kids are
no more kind to each other—Wendy is so insecure that she's become
a congenital liar, and Jon humiliates her with his honed sense of intellectual
superiority (to her insistence on helping Lenny, Jon retorts "We
don't have to go . . . this isn't a Sam Shepard play.") Combine
all this with a physical setting that shifts from geriatric hell in
Arizona to Buffalo in the dead of winter, and the result could have
been grim indeed.
Actually, it is grim. But the movie
is redeemed by the poignance of its script, which is full of brother/sister
and father/child moments that ring all too true. Linney and Hoffman,
when their characters aren't lacerating each other, capture the kind
of rueful self-consciousness many intelligent people feel around family,
as old instincts threaten to overcome their better judgment. Linney
(who's been nominated for an Oscar for the role) is particularly fine:
where the self-evident decency of her characters can sometimes become
dreary—think of her compassionate-to-a-fault role in Love, Actually—there's
an edge to her determination to do good here that crosses over into
something far more, well, human. Check out the scene here where she
rips a pillow out of an old woman's grasp in the nursing home, just
because she intended it to decorate Lenny's bed.
The Savages will never make
the AARP's list of recommended viewing. For all its perceptiveness,
the film never questions our society's absolute dread of old age. Lenny
starts off as a emotional cripple, cantankerous and useless, and he
never develops beyond that. In some circles this might be read as a
realistic lack of sentimentality—Jenkins is too smart to expect
a lifetime's bitterness to be solved by a deathbed reconciliation. But
given the fact that most of us will end up someplace similar, probably
cantankerous and maybe catheterized, it might be nice to find some kind
of significance to arriving there.
©2008 Nicholas Nicastro
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