On Criterion, I watched the 2007 film The Savages, as part of the channel's celebration of Philip Seymour Hoffman movies. It was written directed by Tamara Jenkins (Slums of Beverly Hills, Private Life, writer of Juliet, Naked), and starred Hoffman, Laura Linney, and Philip Bosco in his final film role before his death in 2018.
It's a drama about fractured families, where Hoffman and Linney play Jon and Wendy, two single siblings who each have trouble with personal relationships because of their estranged father's domestic and emotional abuse on them in their childhood, while their mother walked out on them early on. They're brought back together when their father, Lenny (Bosco) is diagnosed with dementia, his longtime partner died, and he needs to be put into a nursing home for professional care. Jon is a theater professor working on a book about Bertolt Brecht, while Wendy is a struggling playwright working as a temp and sending her plays based on her dysfunctional childhood to several foundations for grant funding.
The two siblings have to work together to help their father, deal with the meager resources they have to put him in a no-frills, basic nursing home, and bicker with each other about their own seemingly "loser" places in life. Jon doesn't want to commit to his girlfriend, who is Polish and has to move back to Krakow because her visa expired, and Wendy is having an affair with a married man, who is thirteen years her senior (yet teases her when she calls herself the "younger woman" in their affair, reminding her that she's in her 40s and not so young). It's a messiness with the characters that feels really honest and ugly and relatable, and it's a combination of Jenkins' storytelling about the complexities of middle-aged life with the deep talents of Hoffman and Linney that really makes this film great.
I've really liked Tamara Jenkins' films a lot. I adored The Slums of Beverly Hills (1998) a lot, both as a teen and as an adult, really digging Natasha Lyonne's performance when I was a teen, and understanding Alan Arkin's character more as an adult. Private Life (2018) is a really interesting movie where Paul Giamatti and Kathyrn Hahn play a couple struggling to conceive a child in their middle age, discussing fertility options, and it felt very realistic. And Jenkins wrote the screenplay for Juliet, Naked (2018), one of my favorite recent romantic comedies, where Rose Byrne plays a woman whose boyfriend (Chris O'Dowd) is obsessed with an elusive singer-songwriter (Ethan Hawke), their paths all inter-cross, and it was a really charming movie that not only took away the cult worship of the singer to show him as more ordinary, but also gave Byrne a great performance to play a woman who wanted a child, felt stuck in life, and didn't want to take care of either man.
There were some supporting role performances I really liked a lot. It was nice to see Margo Martindale in a bit part as a nursing home representative interviewing the family for the father's possible residence there. But I really liked Gbenga Akinnagbe as the Nigerian nursing home aide Jimmy, who had this quiet vibe about him that brought more calm to the film, especially as he works in a place that frequently sees the deaths of its elderly residents as routine, like when he tells Wendy about how when the residents' toes curl while they are sleeping or resting, it's usually a sign that they will die within a couple of days, like the soul preparing to leave the body. I don't feel like he got as much acclaim as the major stars did, so I wanted to highlight him because he was interesting to me.
I really connected to this film a lot. I don't know if it's because I'm 40, so I'm closer to the character's ages than I was in 2007 when it came out, or I just liked how both characters are both screw-ups who are both kind of jerks but still compelling to watch. There was just this raw honesty to the brother-sister relationship that I connected with, as well as the reality of having aging parents and thinking about the future.
Linney was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance, and Jenkins was nominated for Best Original Screenplay. I remembered this movie being a big critical hit back then, but never saw it, and I'm glad I finally checked it out, it's a fantastic film.
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