Fortunate to have escaped from the unhappy home of their childhood, the Savage siblings are firmly ensconced in their separate complicated lives. Wendy Savage (Laura Linney) is a struggling East Village playwright who is involved with a married man and makes ends meet by working as an after-hours temp in the financial district. Jon Savage (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a writer and college professor in Buffalo who lives an isolated academic life and can't commit to the Polish woman he has been intimately involved with for years. Despite their emotional handicaps, both of the Savages have so far managed to muddle through their lives.
Special Agent Matti
You want drama, you got drama, kitchen sink and all. It's a conventional look at an unconventional family; not the Royal Tenenbaum kind of family but the unmarried adult children with no children kind of family - the kind of family that's going to die out in one generation. The drama comes from the fact that these ordinary people are caught up in what is, for them, an extraordinary situation: slow parental death. It must suck to be old.
Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney, of course, eat the script for breakfast. The first act seems a little light until you realise that this is as good as it's going to get. Life, it seems, just sucks.
The drama movie The Savages is directed by Tamara Jenkins and stars Laura Linney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Philip Bosco.
M (Moderate themes, infrequent moderate coarse language)
114 minutes (1:54 hours)
Film: 24 July 2008
