Savage love

THE PRESS KIT for The Savages describes director Tamara Jenkins as having established her skill at "traversing dark territory with devastating wit" with her 1998 sleeper hit Slums of Beverly Hills. There's no better way to describe her serio-comic touch, which filmgoers haven't seen for nine years. There really doesn't seem to be much of a bright side about a brother and sister who are faced with putting their father in a nursing home, but Jenkins manages to mine humor and heart out of the bleak circumstances.

The pairing of Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman as self-centered siblings causes the chemical reaction that makes The Savages succeed. Wendy is an East Village playwright who writes grant proposals when she's supposed to be working temp jobs, and arbitrarily lies to the married neighbor with whom she's having an affair. Older brother Jon, with his doctorate in philosophy, writes and teaches about theater of the absurd in Buffalo.

Wendy gets the call first. Lenny Savage (Philip Bosco) was already slipping into dementia before his domestic partner passed away, but now he has to be retrieved from his retirement community in Arizona. Rather than resolving the circumstances of what caused the estrangement with their father, Jenkins emphasizes the relationship between Wendy and Jon as they are thrown back together to take care of an inevitable familial rite of passage.

Linney and Hoffman play off each other well, with their contrasting ways of dealing -- she's anxious and prone to mild hysterics; he compensates for his neuroticism with extreme adherence to rationalism -- showing both the cracks in their relationship and the bonds that won't break. Bosco has the wrenching job of playing a man whose humanism shines through his dementia as he lets go of life. He succeeds with subtlety rather than sentimentality, as does Jenkins. The nine-year wait was worth it.

MATT KELEMEN