Movies about senior citizens aren’t very “sexy” — that’s Tamara Jenkins’s suspicion. While she points out that The Savages has some honourable precedents when it comes to movies about tarnished golden years — Make Way for Tomorrow, Tokyo Story, Umberto D. — and that Sarah Polley’s Away from Her had a warm reception, the filmmaker feels that audiences may generally not be so hot on the subject of aging and mortality. Go figure.
“I think it’s the same reason people don’t visit their grandparents in nursing homes very often,” she says in a recent interview to promote The Savages, her first feature since 1998’s much-cherished cult hit Slums of Beverly Hills. Like its predecessor, Jenkins’s new film is semi-autobiographical, the script being initially inspired by her father’s move into a nursing home. Part of why it took so long for The Savages to get made was Jenkins’s struggle to interest financers. As she quips, “They’re not chomping at the bit to do a movie when you say, ‘It’s about a brother and a sister who put their father in a nursing home. And he’s got dementia. Don’t you want to make that picture? Gimme a couple million bucks!’”
She’s got a point. Even so, the resulting movie is hardly as dark and dire as that pitch would imply. Caustically funny, The Savages stars Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Wendy and Jon Savage, two siblings who bicker their way through the task of institutionalizing Lenny (Philip Bosco), the man who made their childhood a living hell. If done with less smarts, Jenkins’s snarky take on such a serious situation could’ve seemed flippant, but The Savages feels frank and honest.
“The treatment isn’t precious,” she says. “And it’s not a tragedy. That’s because the characters are so flawed. If you made the movie with the same story, where the characters were heroes and there was this wonderful son and daughter and a good father, it would be built in a very different way and take on a more tragic aspect. Whereas in The Savages, all these people are incredibly flawed and having to bumble through this primal situation. And they are ill-equipped — I mean, everyone is ill-equipped, so they’re not that exceptional, really. But I do think that in films there’s often a distaste for that level of imperfection.”
Though overly conventional in other aspects, The Savages is unusual for its richness of characterization. Even the makers of supposedly edgy Sundance fare have come to fear how audiences will react to characters who are not what’s commonly (if vaguely) defined as sympathetic. Jenkins says she’s sympathetic toward flawed characters because they’re who she relates to. “I am not good all the time,” she says. “I am good and bad and petty and selfish and generous. So that cloying grubbing for sympathy that happens in films makes me really unhappy.”
Therefore, it was very important that no actor play Lenny as “one of those twinkly-eyed old codger types,” she says. “Philip Bosco’s performance was so stripped of that, but I find him sympathetic despite the fact that he’s a bastard. There’s something heartbreaking about his diminished capacity — to me, that’s sympathetic.”
Linney and Hoffman devote just as much energy and finesse to their parts as Bosco does to his. Indeed, the roles fit the two leads so well, it seems as if Jenkins created Wendy and Jon just for them. “People say, ‘You must have had them in mind when you were writing,’” says the director. “No, I had people in mind — I was trying to write three-dimensional people on the page. When I had to bring them into flesh, I ended up going with them. Then when people read the script and knew those actors were in, they said, ‘Oh, it sounds like them.’ It’s one of those great marriages of actor and material.”
Considering how ubiquitous both lead actors have become in American movies, it’s also surprising that this is their first pairing. They play to each other’s strengths very well, though it’s clear that these characters found their own ways to recover from the effects of life with Lenny.
“I was so interested in how Wendy and Jon came from the exact same circumstances, but they responded and adapted to the world totally differently,” says Jenkins. “And then they have to do something as a unit, but their styles are so dissimilar. It’s kind of like a buddy movie in a weird way. Instead of robbing a bank, these two opposite characters go on this road trip and have to deposit their father in a nursing home. I realized at some point I was writing this humanist road movie-buddy movie — I thought, ‘I better not tell anybody!’”
You never know — it might’ve made a sexier pitch than what she ended up using.
