Review: The Savages

Simply brilliant in every way, The Savages is an affecting and funny drama about dealing with ageing parents. This deserves far greater recognition than it's getting. Miss at your peril.

Starting with a beautifully observed and pitched script by Tamara Jenkins (with a fully deserved Oscar nom for Best Original Screenplay), backed by careful direction and fronted by award-worthy performances from Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney (surely the best American actress working today, and justly deserving her Oscar nom), this is both painfully funny and achingly sad.

Hoffman and Linney are siblings, brought closer by their father and the onset of dementia that’s affecting him.
But this is no Rain Man – there’s no Hollywood grandstanding here, just delicately observed, realistic relationships. In fact, the relationship between the siblings might just be the most realistic such depiction ever to have come out of Hollywood.

The humour - and there's lots of it - is never forced. And there are a number of nice, sly touches - the depiction of the retirement town as picture postcard perfect offset by Mr Savage Snr scrawling an obscene phrase with his own excrement, the mundanity of Hoffman and Linney's lives, and the way Jenkins scripts avoids Hollywood cliches.

Ultimately, however, this is Linney's film - and if you've ever enjoyed her work, then you must see this.
Score: 9/10

The Savages
IMDb