The Savages – Tamara Jenkins

Dylan Thomas wrote perhaps the best words ever written about age and death:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan’s words have everything Tamara Jenkins’ over-hyped movie lacks: respect for age; and rebellion against the inevitability of a pathetic, passive, sentimentalised drift into oblivion that is the artistic vision at the emotionally vacuuous heart of her film. That The Savages has two fine actors in Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman on top of their game is neither contradictory nor sufficient excuse.

As well as clichéd words and images, it is possible to have clichéd ideas. Jenkins, as writer and Director, takes almost every clichéd assumption about age, each, as with all clichés, containing a specific truth that applies to some people, some of the time; and weaves them into a generalised lie that is as patronising and ageist as it is false. Old people are pathetic, cranky, a burden, half-witted, good for nothing but bingo and ludicrous group activities usually shared in the ante-rooms to death we call Nursing Homes. As portrayed, a bit like a one way ticket to a kind of geriatric Hi De Hi holiday camp where you leave at the end of your stay in a box rather than a bus back to the railway station.

Jenkins eggs this depressingly sickly pudding even more by having Lenny Savage suffer from fairly well established dementia. He is the not-much-loved father of emotionally screwed-up, pill-popping, unsuccessful dramatist Wendy (Linney) and world-weary academic Jon (Hoffman). Don’t get me wrong: of course all of these things exist, and some old people do display such characteristics and end their days in an environment dominated as Hoffman puts in the film, by piss, shit, stink and a gaseous horror that leads only to death. And I accept that dementia, especially Alzheimer’s, is perhaps the one truly tragic disease to which human beings are prey: the ‘long goodbye’ where the person dies before the body they inhabit.

But if you are going to explore this territory you do have to have some half-way worthwhile artistic aspiration. Don’t paddle in the misery of the human condition without having something to say about it. You might as well just put a camera in any geriatric ward, especially perhaps an Alzheimer’s ward and interview relatives who visit. You will of course get images and words that will make us cry. But merely making us sad, upset; just making us cry, isn’t a good enough excuse to do it.

Every old person in this film is decrepit, or pathetic, or ludicrous. No irony, wit, self-mockery, rebellion, remaining intellect, even real anger etc etc. The whole film occupies an ante-room to hell. It is profoundly and objectionably manipulative of its audience for no discernible artistic purpose other than the apparent belief that touching, evoking real and genuine feelings with an emotionally false fictional narrative is an end in itself. The ending is so grotesquely, trying-to-be-heart-warmingly sentimental I wanted to throw a brick at the screen.

God I hate hating a movie, any movie, this much. Especially as it represents the misuse of so much talent. Linney and especially as ever, Hoffman are superb. It is hard to say much about Philip Bosco’s Lenny as his only real acting task is to be pathetic and shout occasionally. The editing is pulse perfect and a nicely composed, if gloomily lit cinematography, creates the right, literally and metaphorically, wintry atmosphere. An unobtrusive piano score adds effectively to the sombre, thoughtful tone. But none of these very real qualities can redeem this movie’s meretricious manipulative central conception.

Pushing 40, unsuccessful playwright Wendy, living off a dubious claim for a government hand-out to New Yorkers affected by 911, hears that her mother has died and her father’s dementia puts him beyond the scope of home-based care. Together she and brother Jon, a PhD in literature and drama theory have to sort out residential care for a father neither really loves and who certainly used to beat Jon. Jon finds Valley View, a modest but caring nursing home for patients with dementia. Apparently not wanting to admit to herself the truth of Lenny’s condition, Wendy puts him through the ordeal of an assessment interview for a posher home that only takes patients with a less advanced condition. Lenny is embarrassed and upset in an interview to test his mental faculties where Wendy tries to mouth the answers to him. Jon is incensed at her refusal to face the facts of the old man’s condition and Lenny is returned to Valley View.

Jon is struggling with a make or break academic book on Brecht and Wendy conducts a pretty dysfunctional love life with married neighbour Larry who appears to use walking the dog (Marley) as a cover for satisfying his lust and Wendy’s need for a regular sex life.

So that we don’t miss the fact that dementia is awful, Jenkins shows Lenny writing on the toilet walls with his own excrement; and standing in his baggy jockey-shorts, trousers round his ankles on the plane when he gets up to go to the loo. Later, a kind male nurse imparts the extraordinary warning to Wendy that patients’ toes begin to curl just before they die. This seems a bit weird to me but even if true, simply manages to make the sadness at the imminence of death seem either farcical or faintly funny.

Under the false flag of concern and empathy with the predicament of age and the impact of the duty of care this imposes on the young, The Savages is shallow and shamefully ageist in conception and execution. I have no idea what ethical message we are supposed to take from the final shots but it is either ludicrously sentimental or demonstrates a grotesque distortion of moral sentiment. Or both

Critical response, even acclaim, for this movie as opposed to the performances within it, takes my breath away. Yet knowing the Oscar committee’s addiction to worthy, supposedly heart-warming subjects, however falsely and manipulatively they are portrayed, it might even win something. Personally I’m going to keep a brick handy just in case.

All around the world, every day, millions of people of age are giving the lie to the stereotyped, cliché-ridden conception of the old that this film cynically uses to massage a few cheap tears out of us. Men and women who are vital, determined, intelligent, effective contributors to a society only too ready to buy into the patronising clichés and assumptions this film perpetuates. I will give the last word to the poetic genius who never wrote a clichéd expression in his life. Indeed in whose whole life the only detectable cliché was perhaps, tragically, his life itself – Dylan Thomas:

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
(January 2008)

Filed under: 1 star, Drama, General, Hollywood, Philosophical, Tamara Jenkins