The Virginia Film Festival

WITH GUEST DIRECTOR TAMARA JENKINS
Year: 2007
Director: Tamara Jenkins
Writer: Tamara Jenkins
Cinematographer: W. Mott Hupfel III
Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Laura Linney, Peter Friedman, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Cara Seymour
Running Time: 113 min.

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In her sophomore effort, filmmaker Tamara Jenkins delivers a richly textured dark comedy about familial responsibility. It’s been almost ten years since she gave us the smart and edgy Slums of Beverly Hills, also showing at this year’s Virginia Film Festival. Oscar buzz has already begun for The Savages, even before a release date has been set.

The film stars Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman as siblings Wendy and Jon Savage, two injured souls who find themselves faced with the responsibility of caring for the very person who injured them in the first place — the father they’ve spent the better part of their lives avoiding.

Linney’s Wendy is insecure, living in a tiny New York apartment with her only company a cat, a ficus, and the married man next door. At 39, she’s still a struggling playwright with a day job and must contend with her older brother’s success as a writer. Hoffman’s Jon is a professor in Buffalo is as emotionally walled-off as his sister; his Polish girlfriend has looming visa problems, but he can’t quite bring himself to save her by committing to marriage. Now Wendy and Jon must put their already arrested lives on hold as they find themselves forced to live together under one roof for the first time since childhood, struggling to find a way to care for a much-loathed father sinking fast into dementia.

Jenkins has spent the last decade out of the limelight honing her craft, including three stints writing at Yaddo, the famous artists’ colony in upstate New York. The time was well spent. Kim Voynar, reporting from the Sundance Film Festival, wrote, “The script is taut and honest, the dialogue sharp and witty, and the performances spot-on.” Brave, honest, and funny, without being mawkish, The Savages is an irreverent look at family, love and mortality.