Cruel to Be Kin

Tamara Jenkins mines a family reunion for great humor in The Savages.

by Shaun Brady

COLD FRIENDS: Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney catch up. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

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The siblings at the heart of Tamara Jenkins' long-awaited second feature may be winkingly named after the protagonists of Peter Pan, but their problem isn't that they never grew up — they just refuse to own up to the fact that they have.

Wendy and John Savage (Laura Linney, Philip Seymour Hoffman) are unmarried, middle-aged intellectuals, not quite estranged but certainly not close. She's a struggling playwright with a mindless day job (largely occupied by filling out grant applications), heavily medicated, involved in a routine affair with a married man, and tenuous at best in her grasp of the truth. He's a theater professor toiling away at a biography of Brecht, unwilling to commit even as his girlfriend gets deported to Poland. As frustrating as they can be as human beings, Jenkins never travels the Noah Baumbach path of making their insufferable self-absorption their key trait. It's there, surely, but they don't wield it against each other.

They're forced to try and stitch themselves back into a family again when father Lenny (Philip Bosco) — cantankerous and, this time, legitimately estranged — begins suffering from dementia. It's a situation, children caring for an aging parent, that's generally considered a role reversal, only Lenny never seems to have exercised his role very well in the first place. It's also typically thought of as a tragedy, though Jenkins mines it for a tremendous amount of comedy.

Jenkins never bothers to fill in the backstory of the family; whatever happened between them is in the past, and the important thing is not what transpired but how it molded the characters that are now forced to support each other. To that effect, Bosco gives a remarkable comic performance as a man whose awareness is rapidly slipping away, but remains just enough to force him to realize that his inattention has come back to haunt him. The look of confused horror in his eyes as his grown children squabble and whine sums up the fear, guilt and frustration of a parent faced with the results of their own inadequacies.

There's never any real reconciliation, or any striving for one. Though it's been nine years since her debut, Slums of Beverly Hills, Jenkins is too assured a filmmaker for that. Instead, having to face up to their past forces her characters to acknowledge their responsibility for their own futures. It's the sort of minor-key lesson that people learn in real life, fitting for a film in which the humor arising from a horrendous situation feels very familiar.

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

The Savages

Written and directed by Tamara Jenkins

A Fox Searchlight release