Anybody who's even vaguely familiar with Peter Pan will know to expect arrested adolescence when introduced to a brother and sister pointedly named Jon and Wendy. But it's writer-director Tamara Jenkins's decision to change the family surname from Darling to Savage that truly speaks volumes. This no-bullshit approach well befits her subject, one so depressing and uncommercial that American movies have generally refused to go anywhere near it, even in passing: the trials of adult children who must suddenly care for a dementia-addled parent. Here, fortyish Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman, really working the schlump), a college professor specializing in Brecht, and Wendy (Laura Linney, surprisingly manic), a failed playwright subsisting on temp work, must put aside decades of interpersonal rancor in order to tend to their ailing father, Lenny (Philip Bosco), whom they both resent for having been a distant and demanding figure throughout their motherless childhood. Squabbling and recriminations ensue, as do heated discussions on the amenities of various nursing homes and the wisdom of allowing poor, fading Dad to show The Jazz Singer in a facility staffed largely by black immigrants.
The Savages has been rapturously received, not entirely without reason — Linney and Hoffman are both typically excellent, mining coarse nuggets of emotional truth from the sediment created by years of buried discontent. But I also think people are just inordinately happy that Jenkins — whose only previous feature, the ticklish comedy Slums of Beverly Hills, came out nine long years ago — has finally made another movie. Her touch is equally assured here, in a very different context, and it's no crime (he damned with faint praise) if the result is solid rather than exciting, expertly covering all the expected restrained-indie bases. Jon and Wendy are screwed up in neatly complementary ways — she's the underachieving neurotic, he's the repressed academic — and their adventure with Dad allows each one to take precisely the tiny, credible personal-growth step (s)he needs. The Savages boasts plenty of keenly observed moments, but it's also the kind of film in which someone says "He won't marry me, but he cries when I make him eggs," and two scenes later, sure enough, there the guy is choking back tears at the breakfast table.
All you need do is take another look at You Can Count on Me to see how much more potent sibling melodrama can be. — Mike D'Angelo
