The Savages

It's difficult for me to watch depressing movies. And, the most depressing to me is a movie about someone losing her or his mind to mental illness or dementia. So, I was reluctant to watch The Savages. Lucky for me, though, it is not depressing at all. It's kind of inspiring and funny. I really loved this movie.

The Savages stars Laura Linney and Philip Seymor Hoffman as brother and sister writers who live in New York. Their father, Lenny Savage, played by Philip Bosco (the cop in Three Men and a Baby), lives in Florida when his woman friend dies. He has dementia and has begun to write on the walls in his excrement. Needless to say, the woman companion's own kids do not want to take care of Lenny. So, Lenny's grown children, Wendy (Laura Linney) and Jon (PSH), are forced to figure something out. They bring Lenny back to New York and put him in a nursing home. Wendy's reluctant to leave him in a place that's affordable but crowded, but Jon says rather convincingly that all the "homes" are the same. The fancier ones just make you feel better about abandoning your parent.

And, Lenny is cared for in the facility. He's not particularly friendly and his dementia is making him more ornery. There's a great scene where he's all proud of Jon for becoming a doctor. But, what he doesn't realize is that Jon holds a Ph.D. in literature and not an M.D. Lenny gets all mad and Jon takes it all with a grain of salt because what else can you do with a mean old man of a father who is basically confined to a bed? It's not worth it to fight any more.

The main characters of Jon and Wendy are just really great--meaning Linney and Hoffman are perfect in their roles. They are trying to be good children to their dad in the present, but it's difficult to discount how the dad has acted in the past. He was apparently abusive and both Jon and Wendy are forced to reconcile with that while making productive lives for themselves. They are closed off in a way from love--as Jon cannot tell his girlfriend how much he really loves her and Wendy has an affair with a married man.

The great thing about The Savages is that there are no big life lessons to learn from the kids having to put their dad in a home. They do it because there is no other option. This just shows that they are responsible adults who have found love and support from one another as brother and sister as opposed to relying on parents for such a foundation. They are really strong, and in the end, they both find the courage to follow their own trajectories. This is just an honest movie with substantial characters. The honesty makes it funny, and I found myself laughing at the absurdity of what life hands us sometimes. We all make our own way and sometimes a difficult past ultimately makes us better artists and better people. And, putting your parent in a home can be a loving and responsible gesture. I mean, we sometimes label responsibility as love and vice versa. And, you know what? That's okay.