The Savages tells the story about a family named Savage, the father who has dementia, and two grown siblings, brother and sister, who have to deal with this problem.
As we get to know the characters, we find they are not particularly close, and the father was not a good father, or a nice person. But the two younger Savages still must find a way to try and take care of him. As the brother says at one point, after putting the old man into a nursing home, "We are doing a lot better for him than he ever did for us."
That quote captures the essence of this movie. The bitterness is still there, but somehow, these two must find a way to still do the best they can for their dad.
Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman play the Savage siblings and did a great job, Linney being nominated for best actress in the Academy Awards. They both emoted confusion and bitterness, and yet they both show the struggle on how to handle this problem, a problem that is tough enough to face if the family is not extremely dysfunctional.
It is not a fun movie to watch. But at times it is very funny, at other times very sad. And always it tries to get at the truth of human relationships...how we grow, how we deal with crappy situations, how we deal with each other. And it succeeds well enough to leave the viewer with some hope that all of us can make it through the crap, and make ourselves better than we were before.
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