Tamara Jenkins dubs her own hyphenate intelligentsia yawp The Savages, casting Laura Linney as Wendy Savage, a temp and frustrated writer submitting to various endowments as the film opens her grant proposal for a new play about a dysfunctional family. Acidic, bitter, embroiled in an affair with a married nebbish, she receives word that her elderly father (Philip Bosco) has begun to show signs of advanced dementia and that she needs to, with her drama professor brother Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman), put him in a retirement home for his last days. A broken family, a reunion, a collection of super-educated, passive-aggressive manic-depressives--The Savages is not at all unlike Noah Baumbach's concurrent Margot at the Wedding in many respects. The place where it deviates most starkly is that The Savages lets its audience off the hook by allowing pressure valves for its escalating conflagrations. The Savages are immanently likeable, Margot is barely human; where The Savages is a black comedy, Margot at the Wedding is a massacre.

I do wonder about the humour inherent in an old broad dropping dead while getting her nails done, or the pathos of a nursing home screening of The Jazz Singer that results in the predictable disapproval of this film's plebeians (blacks) at that film's blackface performances--yet for every comedic situation that's beneath them, there are several more of Linney and Hoffman knocking a line out of the park. I love their work in this picture--she of the secrets and the furtive looks and the crushing disappointments, he of the sublimated humiliations and lumpen resolve and the overall potential for volcanic dissertations. Not enough that his Jon is working on a book on Brecht, however: The Savages is the type of film that spends a long time explaining who Brecht is and then that much more time paralleling the social formalism of the playwright with Wendy's need to have her father in a hospice with better landscaping. News of the father's passing even comes during one of Jon's blackboard lectures.

The Savages only avoids heartfelt pap because Hoffman's and Linney's mutual lack of self-consciousness counteracts the film's surplus of the same. If Margot at the Wedding is a throwback to the forced naturalism of the early 1970s arthouse, The Savages is a throwback to the family dysfunctions of early Sundance. Its polish is comforting and deflating, exorcising itself as it unfolds; a moment where Jon defines the ugliness of dying to his sister before realizing that he has an audience isn't awful as it ought to be, but rather a wah-wah rim-shot. It feels like a mollycoddle of big issues, brave enough to broach uncomfortable topics but not quite brave enough to allow its actors to navigate the human complexities of their impossible situation. Slotted to become this year's Little Miss Sunshine, it shares that picture's broadness, occasional cleverness, and collection of fine performances dedicated to an endeavour that doesn't entirely deserve the talent assembled to bring it to life. As it is, The Savages is a fine middlebrow addition to the end-of-year sweepstakes, as good as expected, as bad as feared, and gone without a ripple to make way for the thorny stuff.-Walter Chaw (excerpted from a longer review found here)

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