So, thanks to a friend who knows my appreciation for the cinema, (thanks Alyna!) especially the free variety, I scored some free tickets to see pretty much any movie I wanted from Fandango. So I picked one that I'd been wanting to see for months, but hadn't yet pursued.
The Savages was a genuine story of two people caring for and dealing with their dying father, even though they've got their own shit going on. Hoffman's Jon and Linney's Wendy are both sort of stuck. Jon's stuck in his comfortable college-professor/writer career, which is so much his focus that he lets the love of his life leave the country with hardly a blink. Wendy temps, steals office supplies, writes plays, sleeps with a normal-looking married man with a dog, and tells a few not-so-little lies to make her life sound more exciting.
Their estranged father's common law wife passes away, and her family leaves him high and dry in Sun City, AZ. So Jon and Wendy bring him back to Buffalo to a nursing home, and with for him to die.
If this were a predictable film, they would get to know their father more, become better siblings to each other, and become fast friends with all of the nursing home's staff and residents. But it's not, and it's full of little unexpected bits, that are completely genuine and believable.
Visually, it was believable too. From the surreality of the Arizona desert, to the messy reality of a Buffalo winter, to the messy clutter of apartments, houses and nursing homes, I felt like I was watching people and places I knew.
The Savages shows that even when you are not close to someone, it's still a hard decision to surrender to the fact that you can't care for them, and that a nursing home is a necessity. There's still guilt and resistance and a million other feelings. And experiencing these is ultimately what Jon and Wendy need to nudge them out of their ruts and get on with things.
1 comment:
If there's anything Hollywood has taught me, it's that everyone has chromy modern furniture that sits like a sculpture on gleaming white carpet in the middle of their art gallery-esque bright loft. If they don't it's a clue to the chaos of their inner thoughts, like Tom Wilkinson in Michael Clayton living in an otherwise empty converted industrial building with unfinished surfaces thinks he's Shiva the God of Death complete with an unruly pile of baguettes.
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