Everett, Wash.
Published: Tuesday, December 25, 2007

'Savages' done well, but it's an all too familiar comedy-drama

By Robert Horton
Herald Movie Critic

 Well, at least "The Savages" can't be accused of being just another indie crowd-pleaser. This comedy-drama is funny in spots, but it's too bummed out about itself (and its characters too disappointed in themselves) to lay on the charm.

The film falls into a certain category of Sundance Festival winners, with its frowzy camera style, its cast (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney), and its East Coast setting populated with smart-mouth characters.

Hoffman and Linney play brother and sister. He is a somewhat professionally successful academic, working on a book about Brecht; she is a would-be writer, perpetually applying for grants that never come and carrying on an affair with the married man who lives down the hall.

They don't hang out, but when their father's health fails and he needs a new home, they must team up. Going to Arizona to meet up with Dad (Philip Bosco), who suffers from dementia, is just the start of their problems.

Given this situation, the movie obviously has a serious subject, but its approach is sardonic and often funny. To her credit, writer-director Tamara Jenkins (who made a similarly odd-toned movie 10 years ago, "Slums of Beverly Hills") doesn't let us forget too often about the father and his particular dilemma.

I have to confess that "The Savages" seemed like a warmed-over family drama to me, even if very well made. It might sound grumpy to complain about two actors as good as Hoffman and Linney, but they've played these kinds of roles so many times that the incarnation of cynical schlub and jittery control freak are perhaps just a little too perfect.

One thing both actors get right is the sense of arrested adolescence in their now-middle-aged lives. Both suffer an unspecified disappointment (the father to blame, apparently), and they've never gotten over it.

Jenkins certainly has the comedy of discomfort down pat. One funny sequence has the siblings choosing "The Jazz Singer" for movie night at a nursing home, forgetting the film's use of Al Jolson in blackface make-up.

"The Savages" begs comparison with Noah Baumbach's "Margot at the Wedding," which has a similar caustic style, but "Margot" is much the better film. Not least because while "The Savages" wraps things up with a neat ending, "Margot" doesn't let any of its characters off the hook.
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