Chris Feil continues his look at the films of Tamara Jenkins...
The Savages came nearly a decade after Tamara Jenkins arrived in 1998 with Slums of Beverly Hills, and the wait found the writer/director’s onscreen family dynamics develop to something tougher. Turns out time brings a whole host of concerns both harder to reconcile and compromise with, both in fiction and real life. Though it deals with timeless issues like family and aging, The Savages is also quite of its time, though in subtle ways it has maybe taken over another decade to see. What’s always been clear is that the film is miraculous.
Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman star as adult siblings and unfulfilled creatives Wendy and Jon Savage, forced to care for their estranged and formerly abusive father as he succumbs to dementia. Jenkins again is fascinated with our unfortunate bodies and social pretenses, this time with the film’s humor taking a more refined, unflinching swing at our very human shortcomings.
In a way, the film is the first self-aware post-9/11 comedy, peppering the film with jokes about abusing FEMA grants and the Homeland Security Advisory System. But moreso, The Savages feels aligned to a specific contemporary mindset of frozenness in the face of reckoning, of not being able to cope with crisis and resorting to our weakest impulses. Here all our problems that were easier to ignore when they weren’t grabbing us by the guts come to cash their check. The film is bracing in how it illustrates how very personal pains handled by an impersonal world make us helpless, while making us laugh at how we can’t help ourselves.
How to care for the supposed caregiver losing its foundational capacities, to face responsibilities where grace seems both essential and impossible? “Wake Me When It’s Over” Wendy names her play, Jon calls his Brecht book “No Laughing Matter”; each of them diagnosing the bifurcated ennui of her time. And their disposition on how to handle their dying father.
But the film’s delicate balance between comedy and drama is in the deft hands of Linney and Hoffman (not to mention the underrated work from Philip Bosco as their father Lenny). Linney landed that Best Actress nomination, but revisionist history to make it a tandem prize is fully acceptable. Though Wendy is more foregrounded, their performances are inextricable, a knot of instigations and resentments underlined in compassion. Separately they’re genius, but together they create the tricky symbiosis that is a sibling unit with bitter, forgiving reality.
The affection Slums had for the past is replaced by a shared history that would rather go forgotten, Jenkins’ whimsy diminished with the weight of age and a void once occupied by optimism. But once again, its humanism, in all of its scatological and humbling reality, that becomes her defining narrative characteristic. It’s not that Wendy and Jon can forgive their father, it’s that they keep going. Trite as that may sound, the film’s understated profundity is how it faces that eternal struggle. “That’s it?” Wendy asks once Lenny’s debilitating struggle comes to its uneventful end, and yep that’s it. But with cutting humor and an eye on our resiliency, Jenkins shows there is so much more.
Even when - no, especially when - it hurts or makes you laugh at the uncomfortable, The Savages is perfect.
More Tamara Jenkins
Slums of Beverly Hills