Laura Linney is pathologically single, brittle and pinch faced. Okay, so this description may well cover everything the actress has done since You Can Count On Me and, sure enough, her role in The Savages is no different. Is there a scene in which the married man who occasionally comes to ‘visit’ grunts on top of her while she lies there like a sack of doorknobs? Well, of course. Is there, in addition to confirmed spinsterhood, an ill-defined loneliness and sense of alienation that hangs around her miserable frame? You bet.
Still, if we’ve seen Ms. Linney play this part before, we haven’t seen her do so in Tamara Jenkins’ fine second film, a belated follow-up to the much-lauded Slums Of Beverly Hills. Like that earlier title, The Savages suggests that writer-director Jenkins knows precisely how to push our buttons. She knows that if you really want to shock an audience out of their complacency, then watching two dysfunctional adults deal with their father’s mental deterioration is every bit as effective as Gaspar Noe’s nine-minute rape sequence.
Pitched somewhere between Away From Her and recent indie seriocomedies such as Little Miss Sunshine and Dan In Real Life, as The Savages opens, brother Jon (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) is a professor at Buffalo who specialises in the theatre of Brecht. Wendy (Linney being impressively Linneyish) is a failed playwright and Jon’s resentful sister.
Late one night, they receive an unexpected call informing them that their estranged father (Bosco), who abandoned them years before, is now smearing faeces on walls. Like their namesakes from Peter Pan, the siblings are childless children who have refused to grow up. Tending to a senile relative proves to be a cauldron of fire. Barbs are traded. Tensions mount.
Smart, analytical dialogue and astute performances ensure that even the Saturday night popcorn contingent won’t be too bummed by the subject matter. Let’s just hope we don’t have to wait another nine years for Ms. Jenkins to get back to us.