In a cold, cold winter evening (we are talking about -20 C), I found myself as one of two lone souls sitting in a theater watching this generally sad movie. Directed by Tamara Jenkins, The Savages is of an increasingly rare breed, in a cinema world featuring diminished wardrobe, cheap CG, full-screen blow-ups and tiresome melodrama. The two leading roles' performance, Philip Hoffman and Laura Linney, are right on as two somewhat distant siblings that are mostly intelligent, but otherwise living what cannot be considered "normal" life. The brother is a professor living in this cold apartment full of scattered books and unable to commit with his polish girlfriend. The sister is an aspiring play writer, scrambling to get by with an on-going sexual relationship with a married man. They are brought together as their dementia dad is suddenly without a place to live after his girlfriend died in Arizona. Together, navigating through general living pressure, unfulfilled dreams, human dignity, they grew up at the end, so to speak. Kudos to the director for keeping the film "true" to life. The nursing homes, as the recurring commercials hinted, is just a reflection of the cold consumerism, offering to ease the guilt of the children for a price. It's basically cold and inhumane, as the orchestrated group exercise, the screening of old racism film. The sister sees this, and tried desperately to convince herself otherwise, amid of facing her own set of crisis. Overall, a solid film, but as the same time, it falls kind of short of comedy as it's advertised, and lacked some enlighting if took as a serious treatise of human struggle. Probably, a 7/10.
