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The Savages

Written and directed by Tamara Jenkins

Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney

Classification: 14A

***

Suffused with clever lines, characters with neurotic tics and a pervasive, jocular black humour, The Savages is more about craft than art, but the craft, especially in the writing and acting, is at a high level.

Writer-director Tamara Jenkins's follow-up to her 1998 film, Slums of Beverly Hills, focuses on a couple of middle-aged, single siblings. Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a professor living in Buffalo struggling to write a book on Bertolt Brecht, and his resentful little sister, Wendy (Laura Linney), is a 39-year-old unproduced playwright in New York with a day job as an office temp. The two have gone their separate ways in life until there's a crisis with their estranged father, Lenny. They get a call saying he is suffering from severe dementia and has taken to writing on walls using his feces.

Wendy and Jon (the Peter Pan names seem entirely intentional) make their way to the sun-dazed Arizona desert community where Lenny (Philip Bosco) lives with his lady friend, Doris. Shortly after they arrive, Doris dies, leaving the fractious siblings to take care of the old man. The wounds and disappointments that have shaped the family aren't specifically mentioned, but both adult children show signs of damage in their relationships.

Wendy is having a half-hearted affair with a good-natured married man (Peter Friedman). Jon, who lives in a slovenly heap of books and clothes in his house, is about to let his Polish girlfriend of four years go back to Europe without him.

Eventually, Jon and Wendy settle their father into a nursing home, though Wendy keeps looking for something more elegant. The most vibrant and acidic speech in The Savages is delivered by Hoffman, when he tells his sister that the heavenly promises of the nursing home where she wants their dying father to stay are nothing more than a way of exploiting guilt and attempting to deny the wretchedness of death. It's a variation on a conversation that many siblings have about their aging parents, and it's a relief to see it spelled out in a movie. At least as well observed, and much funnier, is the sequence in which Jon and Wendy attend one of those too-precious caregivers' seminars – and break the taboo of waiting until the end of the presentation before sampling the free cookies.

Unlike Sarah Polley's superior Away from Her, which deals with the awe and awfulness of life's late decline, The Savages is really about middle age, and grown-up children recognizing their own mortality through their parents' deaths. Some of the movie's best examples of pained humour come when the characters have those conversations they don't want to have. Wendy confronts Jon about the next stage in a conversation he literally can't avoid – he's chained by a chin-strap to the doorframe, to correct a back injury.

The Savages is not consistently strong. The film isn't as free of sentimentality as it pretends to be: Wendy's relationship with a saintly Nigerian nursing home worker feels contrived, and there's a distinctly sitcom-like sequence where they screen the father's favourite movie, The Jazz Singer, before an embarrassed mixed-race audience. Visually, it's no better than a decent television drama, offering a simple visual contrast between the candy-coloured Arizona desert community and rust-belt Buffalo in grim mid-winter.

Where the movie excels is in the performances of the stars, who happen to be two of the most capable screen actors currently working. Bear-like Hoffman and prim Linney thrust and parry superbly in their contrasting styles. He's defensive, physically ill at ease, given to grimaces and angry pronouncements. She's perky and persistent and, we discover, almost habitually dishonest.

Ultimately, the contest of wills becomes secondary to the movie's larger psychological theme, how parents' decline opens the door to a kind of regression therapy for their adult children, which can lead, at best, to a kind of midlife liberation.

The Savages opens today in Vancouver and Toronto.