The Savages

You know the phrase feel good movie? Well, The Savages is a feel life movie, as in feel the pain of living and dying. On some level The Savages could be called a comedy, the poster suggests a touching and happy reunion of siblings. Only the comedy exists on a purely subtextual level. It wouldn't be out of place to compare the experience of The Savages to the theatre of cruelty. It's a beautiful rose only when you grasp the stem it pricks a vein.
Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney topline as a brother and sister who must deal with their infirm father, the equally excellent Philp Bosco, in the thrall of dementia. Here the events get personal as far as dealing with nursing homes and the inevitability of death. In a year of such films as Away From Her, a movie that examines the effects of Alzheimer's on a couple and how it undermines their marriage, The Savages won't be called ground breaking but rather a tough meal to chew. Go ahead and ask the next three people you see if they want to view a frothy comic movie or a drama that confirms your suspicions that dying sucks.
Aside from the subject matter The Savages offers the kind of quality acting that confirms Hoffman and Linney (and Bosco) to be among the best of their contemporaries. Linney plays average and depressed so well with none of the high society matron habits of her turn in Nanny Diaries. Likewise Hoffman, who's over the top in a good way in Charlie Wilson's War and caught between drugs and robbery in Devil Knows You're Dead, gets into the heart of his character, a well meaning but basically souless professor. Hoffman's so caught up in competing with his sister it prevents him from being able to reach out to her. The Savages demands an elite audience versed in drama and human behavior because the average savage just won't get it.