The Savages
Directed by Tamara Jenkins
Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Laura Linney, Philip Bosco
Rated R
Release date: Nov. 28, 2008 (Limited)“I wish I could just sleep until I was eighteen and skip all this crap-high school and everything-just skip it.” — Dwayne Hoover from Little Miss Sunshine

“We’re doing the right thing, Wendy. We’re taking better care of the old man than he ever did of us.” — Jon Savage from The Savages

The Savages: Close To The Bone

The Savages is brutal, honest, funny, and very painful to watch. Tamara Jenkins has crafted a film that hits so close to home for me that I was tempted to walk out at several junctures. This is not to say that she has made a bad film — nothing could be further from the truth. The Savages is an unflinching look at what it means to grow old in America — what it means when the children of aging parents have to step up and take responsibility.

Tamara Jenkins pulls no punches and refuses to sugarcoat her film. If Slums Of Beverly Hills was an honest coming of age story, then The Savages is an honest coming of maturity story. The film serves as a wonderful companion piece to Slums Of Beverly Hills. Jenkins has a natural flair for sibling relationships and their detached relationships to their parents, especially fathers.

It has been nine years since Slums Of Beverly Hills was released. It is a very long time to be gone from the film industry. Some directors can get away with it and others cannot. In this day and age of short attention spans, I would imagine it is not the wisest move to be absent too long. She made only one short film in 2004 called Choices: The Good, the Bad and The Ugly. Regardless, Jenkins has made a wickedly good film. It is not for everyone. Yet, in an era where more adult children are taking care of their older parents, it is a very necessary film. It would have been very easy to write Tamara Jenkins off, but she comes back and makes a very forceful second feature film — in some ways, too forceful and to in your face. But as uneasy as the film is to watch, she brings her trademark humor into the picture whenever things get too dire. I Can Count On You and Little Miss Sunshine would be the two films that act as a bridge between her two films. The estranged sibling relationship of I Can Count On You and the dysfunctional familial dynamics of Little Miss Sunshine serve as an important cinematic bridge between her two films.

Jon and Wendy Savage are the estranged children of Lenny Savage. Lenny (Philip Bosco) lives with his girlfriend of twenty years in a retirement community in Arizona. When his girlfriend dies, Lenny has nowhere to go. Lenny Savage is in the early stages of dementia when his adult children come to get him. Wendy (Laura Linney) is an aspiring playwright who works as a temp in New York City. She is applying for grants in order to finish her play, “Wake Me When It’s Over.” Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a college professor in Buffalo who is trying to finish his book about Bertolt Brecht. The children are both aspiring writers. They are trying to make their own way in the world and they have their own problems. They are not a close clan. They have been estranged from their father for a long time. The mother had abandoned them long ago. The absent mother is a constant motif in Ms. Jenkins’ films. When they go down to retrieve Lenny, it opens up a can of worms. They must take time out of their own lives and do something neither one of them is prepared for — take care of their ailing father. There is a very strong argument to be made that Bosco’s Lenny is an older version of Alan Arkin’s Murray Abromowitz from Slums Of Beverly Hills. Like Alan Arkin in that film and Little Miss Sunshine, veteran character actor Philip Bosco delivers a strong performance. But unlike Arkin, there is very little to laugh at with Lenny. Philip Bosco, like Rip Torn, has a towering presence on the screen. Each actor has found a film in the last several years that reminds us of their vitality in the medium. For Rip Torn, it was Forty Shades Of Blue in 2005. For Bosco, Lenny Savage is a truly remarkable and difficult role. He is by no means a likable character. He is suffering from dementia. His children are trying to find a retirement home to put him. The role could easily turn into unintended farce in another performer’s shoes, but Bosco plays it for real. There is a genuine fear to face. He does not know what is going on. There is an authenticity in his facial expressions and gestures that betrays nothing. In a year of brave performances, Lenny Savage stands out — it’s the bravest performance of Bosco’s career.

As Jon and Wendy Savage, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney are nothing short of perfect. Jon Savage is nothing like Gust Avrakotos from Charlie Wilson’s War or Andy Hanson from Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead. How does he do it? Hoffman has played three totally different characters in one year. It is an astounding feat. He possesses an impressive range. Jon Savage does not want to be bothered by his father’s problem. He wants to help, but keep a distance. I also like how he is fixated on Brecht just as Steve Carell’s Frank Hoover was fixated on Marcel Proust. Jon is very much like his sister, Wendy. Laura Linney brings a lot to the role. Like Joan Allen, she brings a lot to each performance. Like Joan Allen, she does not get the respect and recognition she deserves. At times, it is hard to tell whether Hoffman or Linney are acting — acting comes to them naturally. Both characters are self-medicators and obsessive cereal eaters. Both of them have relationship issues. As much as they have tried to get away from their roots, they are very much their father’s children. While it is very tempting to compare the sibling relationship with the one in You Can Count On Me, I do not think it is the same. Laura Linney was the more responsible one in that film to Mark Ruffalo’s misfit. In The Savages, both siblings are in the purgatory between arrested development and adulthood. The whirlwind of individual psychodramas and creative pursuits must be put on hold. It is time to grow up and do the right thing. Lenny may not have been a good father, but maybe the children can do better and take care of him. Ironically, the film echoes some of the same adulthood themes of Lars And The Real Girl. In the end, The Savages is a film about growing up and making sacrifices.

Tamara Jenkins has made a very important movie for our times. The Savages is the perfect film as we enter the year where the Baby Boomers start to retire. It is the perfect blend of drama and comedy — Jenkins gets the balance just right. Now I must come clean: I am a part-time caregiver for my father. He had a massive stroke ten years ago. Watching Lenny Savage was like looking in a large mirror of my life. Ms. Jenkins gets it very right as her film hits very close to home. There is a scene halfway through the film where Wendy takes Lenny on an airplane. It is a cringe-inducing scene. The flight is a disaster as he has to go to the bathroom. I understood this scene all too well. As uncomfortable as the film may make us feel, I am grateful to watch a film that gets it right. Tamara Jenkins never plays her audience for fools. If The Savages is a film about reaching maturity and adulthood, then Ms. Jenkins has made the ultimate film on these themes.

http://geeksofdoom.com/2008/01/14/movie-reviews-the-savages/

Rated: R
Runtime: 2 hrs

Theatrical Release: Sep 28, 2007 Wide
Box Office: $6,585,535

Synopsis:

Tommy Lee Jones plays Hank Deerfield, a retired military man investigating the mysterious disappearance of his soldier son, Mike, in this somber mystery-drama from director Paul Haggis (CRASH). Charlize Theron is the civilian homicide cop in the small town near the base where Mike… [More]

Tommy Lee Jones plays Hank Deerfield, a retired military man investigating the mysterious disappearance of his soldier son, Mike, in this somber mystery-drama from director Paul Haggis (CRASH). Charlize Theron is the civilian homicide cop in the small town near the base where Mike recently returned from a term of combat in Iraq. When this unlikely pair ends up investigating the mystery together, they encounter some suspicious covering-up from the army. Deerfield gets access to his son’s camera phone which contains startling video footage from combat overseas. Using a muted palette of military browns and greens, Haggis shows the same sharp eye for humanistic detail that served him so well in CRASH, infusing desolate scenes of civilian life–sterile concrete barracks, sleazy strip clubs, homey but empty diners, drugs, fast food joints, and ghostly motels–with vivid detail. Performances are all Oscar-worthy: Jones’s craggy, weather-beaten face hiding grief and anguish beneath a steely facade until they threatens to boil over. His mug becomes a symbol for an America with no other choice but to confront its own grave flaws if it’s ever to find any answers. Susan Sarandon bring the pain to the surface as the anguished mother waiting at home, and Theron is strong and sure, as a single mother who bravely faces, among other challenges, harassment in the workplace. Josh Brolin is her ex, the chief of police, and Jason Patric and James Franco are among the impassive faces of the military. [Less]

Genre: Dramas

Starring: Tommy Lee Jones, Charlize Theron

Director: Paul Haggis

 http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/in_the_valley_of_elah/

This movie has been designated a Critic’s Pick by the film reviewers of The Times.

Etienne George/Miramax

Marie-Josée Croze as Henriette in “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.”

November 30, 2007

Body Unwilling, a Mind Takes Flight

http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/11/30/movies/30divi.html?pagewanted=print

By A. O. SCOTT

Published: November 30, 2007

Julian Schnabel has made three feature films: “Basquiat,” “Before Night Falls” and now “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.” All are biographical, examining the lives of real people, and in each case the protagonist struggles with a condition of literal or metaphorical imprisonment. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mr. Schnabel’s younger colleague in the New York art scene of the 1980s, is trapped by addiction and by his outsider status. Reinaldo Arenas, the gay Cuban poet whose memoir was the basis of “Before Night Falls,” is censored, harassed and locked up by successive dictatorships.

Jean-Dominique Bauby, a French fashion magazine editor and the author of the international best seller on which “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” is based, suffered an even more extreme form of confinement. In his early 40s, he suffered a stroke that left him in a rare affliction called “locked-in syndrome.” He retained vision and hearing, and his mind continued to function perfectly, but his body was almost completely paralyzed. He could not move or speak. In the film a friend, visiting him in the hospital in Berck, a wind-swept seaside town in northern France, reports the latest gossip from the cafes of Paris: “Have you heard? Jean-Dominique is a vegetable.”

“What kind of vegetable?” Jean-Dominique wonders. “A carrot? A pickle?” Like his condition, the metaphor is cruel, but not altogether unredeemable. As we come to understand in the course of this fierce and lovely film, his existence is not that of a vegetable but rather of a garden, a hothouse of consciousness, memory and ecstatic imagination.

Jean-Dominique is played by Mathieu Amalric, a French actor whose twitching, antic physicality makes the character’s immobility all the more painful. But “The Diving Bell,” true to its hero and its literary source, is neither morbid nor mawkish. Propped up in a wheelchair, able to communicate only by blinking his left eye (the other, in one especially nightmarish scene, has been sewn shut to prevent infection), he remains a sensualist, a bon vivant and a keen literary wit.

But never a saint. Before his stroke Jean-Dominique led a life of glamour, pleasure and self-indulgence, for which he never apologizes. He had recently left Céline (Emmanuelle Seigner), his longtime partner and the mother of his three children, an abandonment that seemed to follow a series of betrayals. Céline appears, nonetheless, at the hospital in Berck, fighting back tears and demonstrating a loyalty that comes close to masochism. In spite of his lapses, she clearly loves Jean-Dominique, and she is not alone. Besides other women (Marina Hands, most memorably), there are acquaintances, colleagues (notably Isaach de Bankole) and Jean-Dominique’s father, a rogue of the old school played with magnificent poignancy by Max von Sydow.

The phrase “triumph of the human spirit” hovers over “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” along with a swarm of other empty, uplifting clichés. But Mr. Schnabel and the screenwriter, Ronald Harwood, have other themes in mind. Limitation, constraint, incarceration — these may be, as I’ve suggested, the shared premises of Mr. Schnabel’s films (and also of some of Mr. Harwood’s work, notably his script for “The Pianist”).

Their common subject, however, is freedom, the self-willed liberation of a difficult, defiant individual. But Mr. Schnabel is not content simply to state or to dramatize this idea. Rather, he demonstrates his own imaginative freedom in every frame and sequence, dispensing with narrative and expository conventions in favor of a wild, intuitive honesty.

And yet he also shows astonishing formal control. The movie begins claustrophobically, as we see the blurry bustle of the hospital room from Jean-Dominique’s hazy, panicked perspective. Faces loom suddenly and awkwardly into view, while his captive consciousness writhes in its cage, trying to make contact with the world outside.

After a while it does, with the help of a speech therapist (the marvelously sensitive Marie-Josée Croze) who patiently teaches Jean-Dominique to turn his left eyelid into a means of communication. She sits beside him, reciting the alphabet and stopping when he blinks, piecing together words and sentences from his signals.

Later an amanuensis (Anne Consigny) takes her place, and together she and Jean-Dominique compose the compact, lyrical book that will become Mr. Schnabel’s expansive, passionate film. Their attention also introduces both the patient and the audience to an intense, nonsexual intimacy that is itself a form of love.

As Jean-Dominique’s eloquence takes flight, so does Mr. Schnabel’s. Condemned to live in an eternal present, Jean-Dominique is also freed from the tyranny of time, and so the film ranges freely into fantasy, speculation and remembrance, given shape not by a plot but by the ecstatic logic of images and associations. Working with the brilliant cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, he uses light and color to convey the world of sensations from which Jean-Dominique is exiled, but which he appreciated all the more acutely for that reason.

And so, curiously enough, a movie about deprivation becomes a celebration of the richness of experience, and a remarkably rich experience in its own right. In his memoir Mr. Bauby performed a heroic feat of alchemy, turning horror into wisdom, and Mr. Schnabel, following his example and paying tribute to his accomplishment, has turned pity into joy.

“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has some sexual situations.

THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY

Opens today in New York and Los Angeles.

Directed by Julian Schnabel; written (in French, with English subtitles) by Ronald Harwood, based on the book “Le Scaphandre et le Papillon” by Jean-Dominique Bauby; director of photography, Janusz Kaminski; edited by Juliette Welfling; music by Paul Cantelon; produced by Kathleen Kennedy and Jon Kilik; released by Miramax Films. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes.

WITH: Mathieu Amalric (Jean-Dominique Bauby), Emmanuelle Seigner (Céline), Marie-Josée Croze (Henriette), Anne Consigny (Claude), Patrick Chesnais (Dr. Lepage), Niels Arestrup (Roussin), Olatz Lopez Garmendia (Marie Lopez), Jean-Pierre Cassel (Father Lucian/Lourdes vendor), Marina Hands (Josephine), Issach de Bankole (Laurent), Max von Sydow (Papinou) and Anna Chyzh (model).