If any film comedy prior to The Savages so fully earns the characterization "painfully funny," I'd like to know about it. Or maybe I wouldn't. Tamara Jenkins' long-awaited sophomore directorial effort — her debut, the sharp and strangely sweet Slums of Beverly Hills, is nearly a decade old — would be a farce of mortification were it not for the sad but stout heart that centers it.
Linney, Hoffman, and Bosco are the title characters: Wendy, Jon, and Lenny Savage. Wendy and Jon are brother and sister; she a grant-chasing would-be N.Y.C. playwright involved in a dead-end sexual relationship with a married theater type (Friedman) who invariably comes around for a quick one while he's walking his dog (a good indicator of just how precisely he ranks his infidelities). Jon's an upstate academic wheezing out a book on Brecht while weaseling out of a long-term relationship with a foreign-born colleague (Seymour) whose visa expiration is a pretty convenient excuse for him to not commit. Their treadmills of genteel, educated, petit bourgeois misery slam to a halt when they're called upon to fetch their elderly dad Lenny, whose similarly aged galpal has shuffled off this mortal coil, necessitating his removal from the Sun Belt community where he, and they, expected him to live out the rest of his days.
The kids have never been close to Lenny, whom they describe to outsiders as abusive. But these days Lenny is anything but a fearsome patriarch. Suffering from dementia and unable to control, let alone even understand, his bodily functions, he's more of a colossal and heartbreaking pain, and his brief moments of lucidity don't make anything better, they merely lay bare more misery.
Veteran actor Bosco's portrayal of Lenny's appalling state is so acute one frequently worries about the actor himself during the film — I was relieved to see him perfectly spry at the film's premiere. I generally resist calling any actor's work "brave" or "fearless" or any such thing, but Bosco's work here made me reconsider that self-imposed ban. It's incredible, harrowing, precise stuff.
Doesn't sound very amusing, though, I know, but it's not meant to. The comic juice comes from Linney and Hoffman. Linney's Wendy is a masterpiece of denial on every level, whether perkily exercising to an aerobics tape while stuck in a soulless motel room or justifying a ridiculously unjustifiable ethical breach to her brother. Hoffman's Jon seems to have his head on a little straighter, but his insistent dourness is a poor camouflage for his emotional parsimony. Their dad's plight breaks them down, cracks them open, and Jenkins milks each of their humiliations — self-inflicted or otherwise — for all the comic potential she can. Particularly sputter-worthy is the concoction Hoffman hangs from after spraining his neck in one of the milder tennis-related exertions the cinema has to offer (he makes Woody Allen in Annie Hall look like Andre Agassi), and the very forced conversation that follows.
The supporting cast is suitably strong; Friedman is pretentiously oily as Wendy's non-paramour, Seymour briskly ironic as the lover Hoffman can't/won't step up to the plate for, and Akinnagbe wry and warm as the nursing-home worker Wendy clumsily tries to cozy up to. While the picture's ending is a trifle pat, it's also a bit of a relief, an avowal that even the most screwed-up [S]avage can salvage some sustenance out of the trauma of mortality.
VIEW PHOTOS: Toronto Festival portraits
READ MORE: Laura Linney and Tamara Jenkins Q&A
