Movie Log: The Savages

I saw The Savages in large part because the preview made it look enough like a comedy that The Wife said, "Let's see that." I'd read some reviews, and hadn't quite decided whether I was interested, but that was fine with me.

It does have funny moments, but it's not essentially a comedy, in case you've seen the same preview. Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman play middle-aged siblings -- Wendy and Jon Savage -- who have to care for their aged and deteriorating father Lenny (played by Peter Bosco) after Lenny's girlfriend dies and her kids kick Lenny out of her house in a sub-baked western retirement community.

All head back to Buffalo, where Jon is a professor of drama. (Wendy is an office temp-cum-struggling playwright in New York, though she's doing well enough economically to runaway up to Buffalo for a few months and not have her apartment sealed when she returns.) Lenny goes into a nursing home, and Wendy & Jon cope.

That's the whole movie: it's about how two adult children -- and I use that oxymoronic term deliberately -- live with the knowledge that their father is much closer to death then they thought, and how they live with each other. They both do end up making changes in their lives, by the end, but those are small, reasonable changes, not the usual Hollywood "everything is different" whirlwind.

It's an easier movie to watch than I might be making it sound: it's not about death, it's about how to go on living even though there is death. And both Linney and Hoffman are excellent in it. This is what a small, script-driven movie is supposed to be like; it's a gem.