Beyond the Multiplex

"The Savages" In the opening scene of Tamara Jenkins' long-awaited second feature (her debut film, "Slums of Beverly Hills," was released nine years ago), Mott Hupfel's camera bemusedly patrols the streets, ranch houses and recreation centers of Sun City, Ariz., the geriatric paradise on the sun-baked outskirts of Phoenix. There is controlled irony and gentleness in these shots, both a detached curiosity and a wistful sense that we all may wind up someplace like Sun City, and sooner than we think. It's one of those things you can't quite explain, but I immediately felt comfortable with Jenkins' vision, and felt like whatever was going to happen in "The Savages," she knew what she was doing.

I wasn't wrong. While "The Savages" is a story about decrepitude and death, and chronicles a family whose wounds run too deep, it never has that claustrophobic, trapped-in-a-nightmare feeling of some dysfunctional family flicks. (Noah Baumbach's "Margot at the Wedding," while in many ways an excellent and serious picture, is a case in point.) For one thing, it's pretty damn funny, which means it nails the pretensions of its middle-aged, middle-class protagonists without making them seem like pathological monsters or insects nailed to a board.

Adult siblings Jon and Wendy Savage, played with wonderful chemistry by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney, must travel into the literal and perhaps metaphorical desert to help their estranged dad, Lenny (Philip Bosco), who is suffering from senile dementia and writing hostile messages on the bathroom walls in, you know, a certain medium favored by political prisoners. Actually, Lenny is something like a political prisoner, trapped within a body and mind that have turned unreliable. Bosco's performance is one of the most remarkable things in this movie. Lenny is a hostile old bastard whose moments of clarity are few, embittered and often humiliating -- he is chagrined to learn that Jon, a theater professor in Buffalo, N.Y., is not a "real doctor" but, as Wendy helpfully explains, "a doctor of philosophy." But in his sheer cussedness, his refusal to be nice or grateful or easygoing, Lenny is more recognizably a noble, struggling human being than 99 percent of the golden-age old people you see in movies.

At any rate, it's not clear whether Jon and Wendy are doing all that much better than Lenny. Jon is slowly cranking out a manifesto on Bertolt Brecht -- as Wendy observes, just the thing for the holiday season -- and gradually allowing his charming girlfriend to slip back to Poland now that her visa has expired. Meanwhile, Wendy is eking out a dead-end existence as a Manhattan temp worker and aspiring playwright, herself unable to escape a love-hate-sex relationship with an older married man (Peter Friedman). I must admit that Jenkins may be targeting a niche audience here, and I just happen to belong to that niche; let's just say that if you have any struggling academics in your life, then Jon and Wendy's argument over which of them has been rejected more times for a Guggenheim fellowship will be a gut-buster. Others are forewarned!

There's nothing fundamentally surprising about the story of "The Savages," but compared to a lot of family movies it's startlingly true to life. Jon and Wendy do their best to get over their bitterness about Dad and help him, and their best is better than nothing but frankly not all that great. (They move him to a mid-level Buffalo nursing home, and given the choice I might rather be sent into the desert alone with no water.) What makes the movie memorable is the precision of its tone, its finely calibrated combination of bitterness and warmth. Of course the acting is tremendous, and you'd expect nothing less. Linney's Wendy is fidgety, self-absorbed and neurotic, given to outrageous lies but also oddly competent at moments of crisis. Hoffman's Jon has buried his emotions deeply under his disheveled intellectual exterior and his evident self-loathing, but we know they're still down there somewhere.

Jenkins never tries to explain the back story of the Savage family, but I really don't think that's a flaw. (Their mother is apparently still living but completely out of the picture.) As Edmund Wilson once observed about history, we know the kinds of things that happened, even if we don't know the details. Nor does she pretend that there's some way to redeem their relationship with Lenny at this late stage -- beyond, that is, struggling to learn something useful from a painful loss and moving onward as fractionally more thoughtful people. (Now playing in New York and Los Angeles, with wide national release to follow.)

Next page: A revealing look at contemporary manhood