By Sabrina Cognata

THE SAVAGES is a story about life and growing.  I guess a lot of movies are about life and growing, but realistically this story is about confronting the fact that as you go on with your mundane life everyone you know does also, regardless if you keep in contact r not.  There are themes of growing and forgiveness and the necessity of family in a society that is trained to run away from their childhoods in order to grow up and away from the people they knew as a child. 

The film begins with introducing us to Wendy Savage (Laura Linney).  Wendy’s pathetic life exists between her boring temping job and the affair she’s having with her married next-door neighbor.  She’s trying to get a grant so that she can write her play, which is suppose to be her magnum opus or something, and her entire lame life is interrupted when she gets a voicemail saying that her elderly father, Lenny Savage (Philip Bosco), she hasn’t thought about in years has been caught having a scat party in his own bathroom. 

She immediately calls her slacker bother, Jon Savage (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) in the middle of the night to freak out.  Jon tells his sister they’re only having a yellow alert and they should go back to sleep.  Soon thereafter they enter red alert status when the woman their father’s been living with for the past twenty years passes away and they have to fly from New York to Arizona to come and manage their father’s affairs.

It becomes apparent to both Jon and Wendy that their father is rapidly deteriorating as they are confronted with the fact that their father has dementia and quickly nearing the end of his life.  They move their father into a nursing home near Jon’s home in Buffalo where he teaches.  Wendy decides to stay with Jon until after the holidays and then she will return to Manhattan.  In the time the Savage siblings are forced to live together they end up reevaluating their entire lives.  Jon allows the only woman he’s ever loved to return to Poland when her visa expires and he refuses to marry her.  Wendy chooses relationships that refuse to work highlighting the horrible experiences she had with her father as a child. 


There is an interesting juxtaposition that happens as they become the caregiver and their father becomes the invalid, the child.  Wendy lies to Jon and tells him she got a Guggenheim grand, when in reality she is a recipient of FEMA because she was living in NYC during 9-11.  Jon figures this out and confronts Wendy with it while they are out shopping with their father one afternoon.  As the two begin yelling at one another you watch their elderly father turn off his hearing aid and hide in his parka just like a child.  Even their last name, Savage, distinguishes how they are as people, brute and hideous forces willing to inflict damage onto others to preserve themselves. 

As you would suspect, eventually their father dies and from the tragedy both siblings realize they need to make great changes in who they are in order to avoid becoming their father.  The ending sort of wraps this up for the viewer in a packaged, Disney sort of way, but without the cheese.  Overall, it’s a sad story, but there’s a lot of cleverly infused humor distributed throughout the film that helps deliver such a heavy emotional blow to the audience.