Are The Savages, brother and sister, really that savage? Wonderfully played by Laura Linney (who received an Academy Award nomination) and the inimitable Philip Seymour Hoffman (an Academy Award-winner two years ago for his uncanny embodiment of Truman Capote), Wendy and Jon Savage are alienated from their gruff and abusive father, Leonard, played by the superb Philip Bosco. The film opens on scenes from one of those awful retirement communities in the Sun Belt, age-segregated and devoted to rather peculiar activities designed to keep retirees young at heart. We see a group of women, heavily made-up, the youngest of whom is likely 70, attired in flouncy mini-skirts, tap-dancing to some oldie but goodie. We enter the interior of one of the units, where a Home Health Care Professional named Eduardo is chastising an elderly man then munching a bowl of Wheat Chex. The elderly muncher, Leonard Savage, has failed to flush the toilet. Eduardo is incensed. "I'm not paid to take care of your shit," he announces, ordering Lenny to flush the toilet and snagging his bowl of cereal, promising to return it once the deed is done. "I'm not responsible for you, only Doris," Eduardo proclaims for good measure.

Eduardo proceeds to turn his attention to Doris, Lenny's elderly female companion, fawning over her and dolling her up as if she were a 16-year-old being readied for a date. When Lenny fails to reappear and/or respond to calls from outside the bathroom, Eduardo bursts in to find him smearing a nasty five-letter word on the bathroom wall, using his own fecal matter as fingerpaint. A call goes out to Leonard's daughter.

We have learned a few things about Wendy, a temp worker and playwright wannabe. We know she has submitted applications for fellowships and grants to fund her "subversive autobiographical" play, Wake Me When It's Over. In the play, two children, a brother and a sister, are abandoned by an abusive father. Then their mother goes out on a date, never to return. The children must fend for themselves. We also learn that Wendy is unmarried; she has a cat; she also has a kind married lover with a big dog, Marley, that goes everywhere with him. Wendy is bored with her lover and troubled about everything.

When Wendy receives word of "the toileting incident," she places a hysterical call to her brother, Jon, a professor of English at an upstate New York college; his specialty is the theater of cruelty and the absurd. Jon tries to calm his sister down. "We're not in a Sam Shepherd play," he intones. Jon is 42 years old; he has a Polish girlfriend whose visa has expired and who must return to Poland. He will not commit and marry her—"we're not ready"—although this would forestall her departure. Jon agrees to meet Wendy for the flight to Arizona after arranging for a colleague to take over his class on "Oedipal Rage in Brecht."

We next see them, brother and sister, awkward in each other's presence, as they drive through the retirement community with its identikit homes, trees, and streets. They enter the dwelling where their father spent twenty unmarried years with Doris—who, shortly after the "toileting incident," keeled over and died as she was having her fingernails painted a bright red. Jon assumes that Lenny has some rights—surely twenty years counts as a common law marriage. But Doris' daughter and her husband assure the Savage siblings that this is not the case; that Lenny must leave the home because of the "toileting incident"—in fact the place has already been put on the market—and, besides, Doris' family has no legal obligation of any kind to Lenny. "We love Lenny, but … ."

Wendy and Jon are now responsible for their failing father. They decide to get a full medical evaluation, and the results are not good: Lenny has Parkinson's disease; he has cardio-respiratory failure; and, to top it all off, vascular dementia. The film follows Wendy as she shepherds their increasingly bewildered father onto a flight—as Jon has gone ahead to find a place for Lenny in a rest home in Buffalo. The awkwardness and embarrassment on the plane when Lenny barks his need to go to the toilet and stands up—only for his pants to fall down to his knees, revealing his adult Pampers—is painful to witness. And we can't help but wonder if we will wind up in the same condition some day.

At the "Rehabilitation Center" in Buffalo—director Tamara Jenkins, who also wrote the screenplay, has a keen ear for creepy euphemisms—Jon and Wendy are instructed by staff not to "make a big deal" out of leaving their father. Once the deed is done, Wendy says, "He didn't even know where we were taking him. We're horrible people. Horrible." One is struck at this point by the isolation and loneliness of Jon and Wendy's lives. They are not members of any sustaining community. Apart from Wendy's married lover and Jon's soon-to-depart Polish girlfriend, they appear to lack close friendships. And clearly they have not, as adults, been close to one another.

Wendy is to stay with Jon, to sleep on the couch in his apartment. Entering that apartment for the first time, seeing the piles of papers and books that cover every surface and overflow the interior space, Wendy covers her unease with a wisecrack, as if she were composing a bit of smart-mouthed dialogue for the stage: "It looks like the Unabomber lives here." Jon nervously shifts piles of books and papers around, warning Wendy that "actually there's a system." Her presence is temporary. His books and papers are forever. Jon reassures his guilt ridden sister that "we're taking better care of the old man than he ever did of us." Wendy, unassuaged, pages through slick brochures advertising places with names like "Greenhill Manor." Jon explodes: all the propaganda about wonderful activities and beautiful grounds "isn't for him, Wendy, it's for us—it's to make us feel better. What happens in these places is that people die." And they stink. And it is awful. Watching the film, we may be uncomfortably aware that many of us are part of the "guilty demographic," but there is no way around "the miserable fact that people die."

And so Jon returns to work—he has a steady job, he reminds Wendy, and her life is more portable. Stung, Wendy proclaims that she, too, has work to do; indeed, she has received a Guggenheim to write a play. John, befuddled, can scarcely believe his ears—and for good reason, we later learn. He has applied for a Guggenheim six times, to no avail. Wendy accuses John of jealousy. "No, I'm not jealous. Just surprised." Adding, "I'm really proud of you, it's amazing." They ride out the holidays together with a little help from some Vicodin Wendy purloined from the Arizona home's bathroom cabinet—a prescription for the deceased Doris. It's not long, though, before Jon learns that Wendy has lied about her Guggenheim. A blow-up ensues. It turns out Wendy did indeed receive a grant—from FEMA, Federal Emergency Management, which offered aid to anyone affected by 9/11 who made a successful application. (Your tax dollars at work!) John can't believe it. His sister is "defrauding the federal government."

Brother and sister negotiate an uneasy truce. When their father finally dies, both children are in the room but have fallen asleep. Wendy awakes and is the first to recognize that Lenny is gone. She awakens her brother. "That's it?" "Yeah."

The death of Leonard Savage is attended by two emotionally starved and bewildered adult children. That's it. No extended family. No friends. No clergy. This is what death looks like absent a transcendent framework of meaning. Dazed and empty, Wendy takes the train back to the city. Jon returns to his study. Wendy encounters her lover, Larry, who, as always, is kind and solicitous. He tells her his much-beloved dog, Marley, will be put down the next day. Marley is old and in pain and it doesn't make sense to keep her going. Larry apologizes for caring so much about the dog, given that Wendy's father has died. Abrupt fadeout.

The next scenes take place six months later. Wendy has written a play that is being produced. Jon has journeyed from Buffalo for the preview. He tells his sister that her "combination of naturalism and magical realism is very effective. It's good. It's really good." He's off to a conference in Poland: maybe, just maybe … . The film's final scene features Wendy jogging. Alongside her is the once-doomed Marley, whom Wendy has adopted and fitted with a special device with wheels that enables dogs whose hind legs have given out to continue to walk and even to run. Wendy has saved a life.

But why?

Did the death of Lenny liberate her from the psychic burden he embodied? Did going through her father's death liberate her for creativity, for getting out of her self-encased and wounded narcissism? Have Jon and Wendy become less savage, more human? The film suggests yes, but in an understated way. The Savages is directed competently, not brilliantly, but that's okay for a "little film" of this sort. And the screenplay is a cut above: it isn't brilliant, but it is intelligent, with an eye for the ridiculous if not the sublime. What one takes away from The Savages is a sinking sense of human disconnectedness, loneliness, the stripping of human beings down to the bare reality of "the self." We are reminded, quite viscerally at times, that selves cannot go it alone. In fact, the self cannot be fully a self in isolation. A small film but a big theme.

Jean Bethke Elshtain's Gifford Lectures have just been published as Sovereignty: God, State, and Self (Basic Books).

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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