Family matters

Wendy Savage (Laura Linney, left) must deal with her father (Philip Bosco), who develops dementia in the Tamara Jenkins film The Savages. (Twentieth Century Fox)

Anyone confronted with the vicissitudes of an aging loved one comes to know intimately the touchstones of heartbreak that make up those last years and days: the late-night phone call that all is not well with mom (or dad or granny or auntie); the selection of a nursing home; the paring down of a lifetime of possessions. All three familiar scenes, and more, make their way into the tragicomic new film The Savages. When a dementia-addled father is told by his grown children that the nursing home requires his opinion on “pulling the plug,” he asks, “What the hell kind of hotel is it, anyway?”

Most of these brief, typical moments were pulled from the recent experience of writer-director Tamara Jenkins. In the process of researching The Savages, she visited a nursing home while scouting a prospective location.

“I told the staff: ‘It’s a movie about a brother and sister whose dad has dementia. We need a parking lot for a fight in the parking lot.’ And they were like: ‘Mmmm-hmmm, we know those,’” Jenkins laughs. “They knew that that’s what happens: family members go out to the parking lot, and they have the argument.”

Considering the universality of the experience, it’s strange that there are more movies about animals playing sports than there are about aging parents. “I think taboo is too extreme [a word], but it’s something that happens off the grid,” said Jenkins, sitting in a hotel room in Toronto, a corona of black curls around her head. “Your office mate Janet disappears for a while, and there are whispers about her sick mother. She comes back and no one really talks about it.”

Jenkins walked both her grandmother and her father through nursing homes and dementia. Because Jenkins’s father was much older than her mother, she was in her early 30s when he first needed care. These days, Jenkins, 45, is watching her friends struggle through that familiar topography.

“It’s weird because it happened to me so early, and I was very alone when I went through it. It wasn’t like my father died of cancer, and I was 30; he died of mortality, and there was no rulebook for that,” she says.

Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Wendy face the responsibility of caring for their ailing father in The Savages. (Twentieth Century Fox)

The Savages joins Sarah Polley’s Away From Her as that rare filmic stare-down with aging, but it comes off as the earnest Canadian film’s neurotic, sad-funny cousin. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney play Jon and Wendy Savage, 40-ish siblings in arrested development whose names recall those other age-resisters from Peter Pan. One night, Jon, a professor of theatre living in Buffalo, is woken from his literal and figurative slumber. His sister is on the phone with news that their dad, played by Philip Bosco, has been writing on the wall of his Arizona retirement home with his feces. Wendy, a wired Manhattan playwright-cum-temp and a pathological liar, helps transport their estranged father from the blinding sunshine to icy Buffalo. What follows is a slow, painful march toward mortality, marked by comedy and indignity, often at the same time. At one point, on an airplane, the disoriented father wanders the aisle, and his pants fall down to reveal an adult diaper. It’s a wrenching moment: Wendy stands next to her father, at once protective and appalled.

“That’s my sensibility, in a way, that delicacy of being able to swing from something dramatic to something comic,” says Jenkins. “I didn’t go for the external joke, the fart joke, though there is some scatological humour in there. But the humour is character-based. It’s the underbelly of what’s happening all the time. How are you supposed to behave when people are dying? You behave in very honest ways, with love and mixed motivations, and it’s funny a lot of the time.”

In one of the film’s sweetest, and most startling, images, Jon and Wendy — who finish each other’s sentences and grow quickly irritated with one another’s weird, ossified ways — are curled up on a bed together, asleep.

Writer-director Tamara Jenkins. (Bryan Bedder/Getty)

“A friend of mine remarked that you just don’t see male-female intimacy that isn’t sexualized,” Jenkins said. “But I was really interested in sibling relationships. I have three brothers in real life. It’s a strange thing to be siblings, to grow up under the exact same circumstances and adapt in completely opposite ways. Wendy is so emotive and reactive, and Jon is this brutal rationalist. It’s like some strange, humanist buddy picture, but it’s brother and sister, and they’re dealing with putting their father in a nursing home, instead of robbing a bank.”

Jenkins explored familial dysfunction before, in her acclaimed feature debut, the 1998 film Slums of Beverly Hills. That film, about a mortified, low-income teen living with her brothers and salesman father on the outskirts of poshest Los Angeles, drew on Jenkins’ own peripatetic youth. After the accolades, she seemed to vanish for almost a decade.

In the time between, Jenkins did some rewriting and worked on classroom sex education films. She also attempted, unsuccessfully, to make a biopic about Diane Arbus. “Two years of my life down the Bermuda triangle,” she said.

She continued living in New York’s East Village, where daily dog walks past a neighbourhood retirement home planted the first seeds of The Savages. In 2002, Jenkins married screenwriter Jim Taylor, who shared a Best Screenplay Oscar with director Alexander Payne for Sideways. At one point during her work on The Savages, the script ran 200 pages.

“I don’t know how people that write and direct can turn around and have the next one right there,” Jenkins says. “People keep asking me where I was, and I’m like, I was practicing writing. It’s hard; it’s hard.”

When courting her stars, Jenkins met Philip Seymour Hoffman in New York and flew to Colorado where the actress Laura Linney was living. She had faith in their talent but was anxious about their chemistry as a couple. But within moments of observing Linney and Hoffman together at their first meeting, the director relaxed.

“I think they’re of the same cloth as Jon and Wendy, in that they’re kind of opposites themselves,” she says. “Laura is better on the first couple of takes; Phil gets better later on. Phil enjoys the analysis; Laura doesn’t talk, she wants to do. But you throw them on a court together, and they just play. They’re these great athletes, so warmed up and amazing.”

Despite the allure of such Oscar-friendly stars, it took years for Jenkins to secure financing for The Savages. “Maybe people are afraid that old people just don’t sell tickets,” she laughs. But now that the film has done well at Sundance and the Toronto International Film Festival, it’s being positioned by Fox Searchlight as a holiday hit for the grown-up set.

“You know, it’s not a public-service announcement,” says Jenkins. “I was interested in the fiction concerns, but I do feel like there’s a need to look at dying. That’s what you read fiction for, that’s what you go to movies for, to see the human experience examined.”

The Savages opens in Toronto on Dec. 21.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

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