After a fantastic feature film debut, writer and director Tamara Jenkins disappeared from cinema. In 1998, Slums of Beverly Hills announced a new, fierce wit emerging from the independent film scene. But just as quickly as Jenkins came into focus, she receded into the background. She struggled with a sidelined Diane Arbus biopic and eventually migrated to Yaddo, the famed artists’ colony in upstate New York.
But Jenkins has returned from her nine-year film hiatus (near Terrence Malick proportions) and her new creation, The Savages, is one of the most brutally honest films in recent memory about the pains of growing old. Life, in both middle and old age, is a bizarre trip – equally depressing and humorous, surreal and straightforward.
Jenkins opens the film with scenes from the odd retirement community of Sun City, Ariz., where the oversized cacti dwarf the residents. Lenny Savage (Philip Bosco, Freedomland) must be taken to a hospital after an altercation with his girlfriend’s caretaker; Lenny smears his feces on the wall, etching in the word “prick.” Where so many other writers would have used such an instance as a scene of comic relief, Jenkins underscores the implicit sadness: Lenny has lost his mind.
Although Lenny never amounted to much of a father, his children arrive on the scene to take care of him, or at least deal with the situation. Wendy (Laura Linney, Breach) leaves her dead-end desk job in New York City and her married lover Larry (Peter Friedman, Unconscious) to meet her brother Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead) in Arizona. It is Jon who immediately takes control of the situation, treating his father as a responsibility, or, more succinctly, a problem to be solved.
The film’s energy rests largely in the phenomenal give-and-take executed between Linney and Hoffman, though both feed off of an incredibly tight script courtesy of Jenkins. Linney’s Wendy Savage aspires to a more creative existence, while Hoffman’s Jon fancies himself a tormented writer. Both characters easily qualify as dysfunctional, but their flaws carry none of the Hollywood brand of desirable quirkiness. They have inherited all the pitfalls of a broken childhood home.
Still, Jenkins balances out the drama and comedy. Wendy swipes a bottle of Percocet from Lenny’s dead girlfriend, popping the pills frequently and offering them willingly to Jon. She fights to escape the onset of an inevitable middle-age crisis while simultaneously battling with the guilt of locking her father away in his waning hours.
While Jon settles on placing Lenny in an institution-like nursing home near his place in Buffalo, N.Y., Wendy dreams of the fancy, expensive Greenhill Manor for her father. Linney and Hoffman, at the top of their craft, bicker and butt in on one another as they wait out Lenny’s final days.
And Bosco delivers Lenny’s slip into dementia with the ease of a top-notch professional. As Lenny, he is impatient with his children and upset by a world he no longer understands. By the time he makes it to the nursing home, removed from his home in the Southwest, Lenny has no clue where he is; he assumes it is a hotel room.
Behind the camera, Jenkins works in a skilled and rare invisible style. Her compositions never approach haughty art-house symbolism. The images have been carefully selected, free of pretension, shot economically on a handheld camera by cinematographer W. Mott Hupfel III (The Notorious Bettie Page).
There are no intellectual or psychological ruminations on death in The Savages, no Bergman-esque scenes of recognition à la Wild Strawberries – just a gray winter in Buffalo and the long-awaited quiet slip into the cold, dark night. When death comes, there are no white lights or angels singing. For everyone involved, it is a total relief.
But Jenkins’s film does contain a distinct emotional journey for its deeply troubled main characters. The star-power in the top billing never leads to superficiality: The Savages feels uncompromised and unassuming.
The emotional aspect of the film manages to sneak up behind the snappy dialogue and excellent performances. Thanks to her peers at the writers’ commune, the fresh forest air or whatever else might have prompted Jenkins to elevate her craft, The Savages completely absorbs the viewer. With Slums, Jenkins constructed something entertaining and memorable; The Savages is another story altogether.
zherrm@umd.edu
RATING: 4.5 STARS OUT OF 5
