The advantage of writer/director Tamara Jenkins's deadpan cynicism is that it cools the audience into being completely comfortable with the story even during its least comfortable moments. Her dry-as-cardboard attitude is the key to the film's succeeding without alienating any kind of broad audience. The film is set in Buffalo, with some brief moments in the retirement communities of Florida's superficially charming waiting room of death. The two main characters, played by two of the greatest actors working right now, are not only everyday sorts in terms of their occupations as unsuccessful playwright and theater professor drudging through a book on a forgotten literary icon, but are also similar enough in their occupations to infer the sharing of interests and pursuits that fueled the by-gone good times of their sibling relationship they might've had in the past.
While the movie is quite funny, it doesn't spare the viewer anything, something that is incredibly admirable, especially for a breakthrough film for its filmmaker. The two siblings, begrudging each other, come together for the questionable but accepted task of putting their father, who is going senile, in the most suitable nursing home. But neither of them are close with him because he was quite a terrible father. There is no real sunny side to their lives, which they must painstakingly reevaluate because of what they face. Yet we delight in the comfort of a film so down to earth, disillusioned, and mature and alive enough through its wryness to find congruence with humor.
The oustanding highlights of The Savages are the two lead performances by Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who are so self-aware and realistic that one can't help but directly connect them with the characters they are playing. The sibling relationship they portray is one of the most endearing and natural that I've seen since Raging Bull, yet with Linney and Hoffman, there are times when something is funny but not initially designed for the audience to laugh, but for the two of them to unexpectedly laugh together despite whatever may have been happening seconds before, and thus we laugh, not out of the same situational amusement because of what we as the audience are in on that the character are not, but out of the teary sweetness and relation we feel.
While the movie is quite funny, it doesn't spare the viewer anything, something that is incredibly admirable, especially for a breakthrough film for its filmmaker. The two siblings, begrudging each other, come together for the questionable but accepted task of putting their father, who is going senile, in the most suitable nursing home. But neither of them are close with him because he was quite a terrible father. There is no real sunny side to their lives, which they must painstakingly reevaluate because of what they face. Yet we delight in the comfort of a film so down to earth, disillusioned, and mature and alive enough through its wryness to find congruence with humor.
The oustanding highlights of The Savages are the two lead performances by Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who are so self-aware and realistic that one can't help but directly connect them with the characters they are playing. The sibling relationship they portray is one of the most endearing and natural that I've seen since Raging Bull, yet with Linney and Hoffman, there are times when something is funny but not initially designed for the audience to laugh, but for the two of them to unexpectedly laugh together despite whatever may have been happening seconds before, and thus we laugh, not out of the same situational amusement because of what we as the audience are in on that the character are not, but out of the teary sweetness and relation we feel.