The Savages
The Savages opens with gentle, panning, streetscape views of Sun City, Arizona. It looks like an ad from the1950’s, promoting urbanisation. Sunny, clean, single-storey houses, showcased with a nostalgic tune from yesteryear. It’s charming, in a somewhat kitsch way, but somehow warm, safe and appealing.
From a row of manicured hedges, a band of older women in glitzy tap outfits appear and run their routine in slowmo.
Then it becomes clear: Sun City is a place for the elderly. The song we’re hearing is one they would have heard when it was first released. Sun City, it turns out, is a mecca for the elderly looking to downsize their lives and keep their older, frailer and poorly insulated bodies warm.
Two siblings whose parents have been virtually absent, are given responsibility for their estranged father, upon whom dementia has cruelly descended, and who has been living in this sun-clad city. His despicable demeanour won’t make it easy.
The sunshine soon vanishes from their lives, and the jokes are delivered less frequently as the film progresses. What has begun as a quirky, somewhat eccentric film about siblings reunited with their absent father, soon becomes a heart-wrenching examination of what baby boomers, and even younger generations are now facing in droves: caring for their longer-living but physically ailing elderly relatives.
Each sibling deals with the situation differently. Wendy (Laura Linney), a neurotic office worker with aspirations of becoming a playwright, having discovered a briefcase of family memorabilia among her father’s belongings, feels increasingly sensitively predisposed towards her father, and makes his comfort a priority. But who, or what, is she really trying to comfort? Her father’s distress, or her own guilt?
Her older brother Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman), an academic, is more pragmatic in his approach. Charged with the responsibility of finding accommodation for their father, he is able to distance himself. For a time. Or is he just hiding?
These two siblings have been put in a confronting situation: sufficiently confronting for children who love their parents, but even more challenging for these two, who were clearly a low priority in their parents’ lives.
There are other issues floating around in this story, among them, the sibling rivalry that has chased Jon and Wendy into middle age. We also see how their early family life shaped their development and subsequent ability or otherwise, to forge healthy relationships with others as they matured. We also get an idea as to why Jon cries when his girlfriend makes him eggs for breakfast.
Will the Savages cope? Is it possible for an agonising situation such as this to pave the way for anything good?
This is a fine film in so many respects: the screenplay, the direction, and the acting (no surprises there). It’s disarmingly amusing at times. But mostly, it’s moving; and ultimately life-affirming, in a curiously tragi-comical fashion.