The Savages

20th Century Fox

Review in a Hurry:  Some actors are only happy—and at their best—when they're playing miserable. And so it is with Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman, the dysfunctional leads of this tragicomedy about a sad-sack brother and sister struggling with their senescent father.

The Bigger Picture:  In The Savages, the dying isn't easy, and the comedy is brutally hard. When attempted playwright Wendy (Linney) and absurdist professor Jon (Hoffman) suddenly find themselves providing for their estranged, ailing father—an unstable fellow even before he started playing with his own excrement—they're faced with a series of unappetizing choices and existential crises that would bedevil even the most stouthearted of people. Which, unfortunately, they aren't.

The Savages hangs on these two performances, and it's hard to imagine anyone else in these roles. Wendy's pathologically manufactured histrionics are perfect for Linney, and Jon's sleepy anguish requires the sort of patient, tip-of-the-iceberg performance Hoffman does best. Together they present an interlocking series of snapshots of mostly real people at their most vulnerable.

Writer-director Tamara Jenkins (Slums of Beverly Hills) has a keen eye for the details of desperate lives. The only thing that keeps The Savages from being a truly universal film about dealing with aging and death is its subjects' pretensions and professions. There's nothing these two can't overintellectualize.

You'll get the most out of this if you're capable of cringing until you laugh; there are so many squirm-inducing moments in The Savages you could inadvertently change seats a couple of times before the credits roll. But by the end, you'll still be there watching: Like any car wreck worth rubbernecking, the worse it is, the more you have to slow down and look.

The 180—a Second Opinion:  This can be a miserable little film, the feel-bad holiday experience you hope never to have with your own relatives—and wouldn't care to remember if you did.