389 - The Savages
May 15, 2008 – 11:21 am
Although it features two galvanizing performances, by Laura Linney and Phillip Seymour Hoffman, The Savages is a little too despairing and bleak, wallowing in a murky sea of negativity and even stooping to manipulate the bejeezus out of its audience near the end. It’s difficult to watch, sort of like 1998’s Affliction only without the grizzled crankiness of Nick Nolte to soften the grim viewpoint.
Wendy Savage (Linney) is 39 years old and works various temp jobs as she struggles to gain footing as a playwright; older brother Jon (Hoffman) is a philosophy professor. Neither has been close to their father in many years, so when Wendy gets a call from the Arizona desert that Lenny (Philip Bosco) has been smearing his own feces onto walls, they have to hustle out west. Where, of course, they find out that Dear Old Dad’s longtime girlfriend has just keeled over, leaving him homeless.
If you’re at that age where you’ve figured out that your parents aren’t gonna live forever, the next reel of the movie is both poignant and grueling, although it’s also a bit vicious and unsettling. Wendy and Jon have to find a place for Lenny to live, and he’s obviously showing early signs of dementia. One of their escapades involves a transcontinental flight, just Wendy and Lenny. Hilarity ensues, just the wry, perhaps-familiar kind. Lenny drifts in and out of reality, sometimes conflating his life with those of movie characters. Sometimes he thinks he’s in a hotel, and sometimes he doesn’t recognize his kids. Oh, and the siblings! There’s a tiny bit of resentment and bitterness there, you see. Jon is successful; Wendy is not. Wendy has feelings of inadequacy around her brother, and both of them were (verbally) abused and then abandoned by their father long ago. So there’s a strong undercurrent of raging subtext in this journey into hopelessness.
So the story isn’t so much about the two grown-up kids dealing with the incapacitation of their father as it is about sibling rivalry and dealing with long-forgotten slights and neuroses they didn’t realize they had. Adding to the complexities is an affair that Wendy is having with a married man (she even gets to trot out the “I’m not married, but my boyfriend is” witticism). Then there’s a cloying bit about an old dog, and a feisty cat … and let’s just say that the most exciting part is when Lenny’s smearing feces on the wall in the first scenes of the movie.
Nothing against either Linney (who was nominated for an Oscar here) or Hoffman, because they both gave more to the picture than it gave to them. Without their effort here, the movie would have been even muddier and depressing. But unless it strikes you in the right mood - perhaps introspective, perhaps schadenfreude - you could find yourself weighed with self-doubt and self-pity, grasping at threads of your life that you thought had long vanished.
**
A while ago, I had a slightly different grading system for movies. The lowest possible rating, you see, was BOMB. As in, it’s explosively awful. I changed that because it was a direct ripoff of Leonard Maltin’s system. So now the worst rating a movie can get is simply one star (*).
Although it didn’t do particularly well in U.S. theaters, thus imperiling sequels, I found The Golden Compass to be highly entertaining and imaginative; it represents all the reasons I watch movies in the first place. It’s fast paced, managing to pack in hundreds of pages of narrative into about 110 minutes of movie. On the downside, the movie ends a bit earlier than perhaps it should have (i.e., not at the same point as the end of the book on which it’s based), leaving the viewer wanting more.
Michael Clayton, despite wonderful, sincere performances by George Clooney, Tilda Swinton, and Tom Wilkinson, is alternately confusing and overwrought, and once the bells and whistles of the extraneous plot devices are stripped it’s no better or worse than a standard John Grisham adaptation. There, a nice run-on sentence to start things off. And a sentence fragment.
When you hear the term American Gangster, you think of 1930s Chicago, with Baby Face Nelson and Al Capone running guns and liquor. But this American Gangster ain’t your granddad’s gangster; here, the setting is Harlem in the 1970s, and the main man is Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington), a former wiseguy driver, of all things, a man who figures out that the best way to sell heroin to the willing naifs of the Big Apple is to go straight to the source. Business 101, lads.
Paul Scofield is probably best known by American audiences for his portrayal of the high-minded 
counselor Sir Thomas More in the 1966 film A Man for All Seasons. But as a classically trained Shakespearean actor, Scofield made his mark on the stage, particularly in London’s legendary West End productions. Scofield died on Wednesday from leukemia at age 86.
In A Mighty Wind, Christopher Guest does for folk music that he’s also done for small-town theater, dog shows, and moviemaking, that is, mock the hell out of the subject while also embracing it wholeheartedly. And that’s both the plus and the minus of this movie; it’s so dead on that the parody aspect is almost overwhelmed by the realism and subtle digs at various subsets of the folk-music universe.
30 Days of Night is a standard vampires-attacking-a-remote-town movie with the gimmick of the far-northern Alaskan setting that provides the condition of the title. See, because vampires can’t exist in direct sunlight - bet you didn’t know that - so thirty consecutive days without sunlight would be like heaven to them. But that’s about it as far as originality for this by-the-numbers gorefest, although the thick arched eyebrows of Josh Hartnett provide some measure of entertainment.
In this, the month of our bracketizing and whatnot, 
