The Savages - Preview & US reaction
Preview by Jack Foley
THE Savages, directed by Tamara Jenkins, and starring Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman, is an irreverent look at family, love and mortality as seen through the lens of one of modern life’s most bewildering and challenging experiences: when adult siblings find themselves plucked from their everyday, self-centred lives to care for an estranged elderly parent.
The last thing the two Savage siblings ever wanted to do was look back at their difficult family history. Having wriggled their way out from beneath their father’s domineering thumb, they are now firmly cocooned in their own complicated lives.
Wendy (Academy Award® nominee Linney) is a struggling East Village playwright, AKA a temp who spends her days applying for grants, stealing office supplies and dating her very married neighbour.
Jon (Academy Award® winner Hoffman) is a neurotic college professor writing books on obscure subjects in Buffalo.
Then comes the call that informs them that the father they have long feared and avoided, Lenny Savage (Tony Award® winner Philip Bosco), is slowly being consumed by dementia and they are the only ones that can help.
The Savages marks the return of writer and director Tamara Jenkins who won acclaim for the humour and humanity of her previous film, The Slums Of Beverly Hills.
The film proved very popular when it played at The London Film Festival and won considerable acclaim upon its release in America earlier this year.
The New York Times, for instance, wrote that “Tamara Jenkins’s The Savages is a beautifully nuanced tragicomedy about two floundering souls”.
While Variety stated: “Tamara Jenkins excels more at maximizing individual moments here than at developing a meaty storyline. But a great many of the moments are choice.”
The Hollywood Reporter wrote: “Jenkins walks this dramatic tightrope with breathtaking ease. The humour is never forced but always springs from the characters and situations naturally.”
And Premiere Magazine opined: “If any film comedy prior to The Savages so fully earns the characterization ‘painfully funny,’ I’d like to know about it.”
The Savages opens in UK cinemas on January 25, 2008, but in the meantime, why not check out photos from the b>London Film Festival premiere or watch the trailer