A touch more breeze might
have benefited Hoffman’s other end-of-the-year opening, the smart but somewhat
claustrophobic The Savages, in which
he is paired with Laura Linney. If Hoffman's performances frequently contain an
undercurrent of fury, Linney’s are rarely more than a few steps removed from
panic, and these tendencies interact with contrapuntal precision in Tamara
Jenkins’s dark comedy about two siblings forced to care for their estranged
father (Philip Bosco) as he slips into senile dementia.
Wendy Savage (Linney) is a would-be playwright who temps to
pay the bills and sleeps with a married neighbor while he’s supposedly out
walking the labrador. (The most memorable shot in the film is of her reaching
out to touch the dog’s paw in the midst of one such coital encounter, a pitiable
grasp at the connection sex isn’t providing.) Her brother, Jon (Hoffman),
teaches university classes in “the theatre of social unrest” while struggling to
complete his book on Brecht and pining for an ex-girlfriend who has flown back
to Poland.
The operative word for both siblings, in other words, is “drama.”
And this is before
they get the call from a retirement community in Sun City, Arizona,
telling them that their father, whom neither has spoken to in years, has taken
to writing obscenities on the bathroom wall in his own shit. They fly out
together to retrieve him and set him up in a rest home near Jon’s house in Buffalo. (Because who
wouldn’t want to spend his dying winters in Buffalo?) There, the siblings begin grinding
their insecurities against one another--his, passive-aggressive; hers, manic-defensive--to
alternating comic and tragic effect.