If The Savages puts you to sleep, don’t feel bad. I nodded off three or four times, too. Immediately following these millisecond escapes, I would check my phone and, each time, discover only ten, maybe twelve minutes had passed since the last time I checked. In other words, the movie drags. In fact, by the time the almost two-hour-long movie wraps, you feel like you’ve sat through a four-hour mini-series about what happens when self-centered adults are forced to contend with caring for their ailing father.

The thing is I don’t think I hate the movie. Hell, I know I don’t hate the movie. The performances from leads Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney are as good as they come; the dialogue more often than not is nuanced and vibrant in all the ways I appreciate dialogue; and the direction from Tamara Jenkins, last behind a camera with The Slums of Beverly Hills, serves her self-penned material well.

The problem is just the utter lack of momentum that Jenkins was probably aware of when she wrote and shot the script. She’s okay with it. The actors seem okay with it. But I’m not okay with it. I don’t want to see movies that put me to sleep, especially movies I want to like. Consequently, I’m bitter over The Savages; I wanted to love every minute of it, but instead can only rave about aspects of it while faulting the whole.

Philip Bosco plays the head of the titular clan, Leonard Savage, a horrible man who never loved his children and now, in his dementia, writes things like "prick"with his own feces on bathroom walls. When his common-law wife of twenty years dies, leaving Lenny out on the street, responsibility for his care falls upon the bastard’s two children, Jon (Hoffman) and Wendy (Linney). The younger Savages, who live in Manhattan and Buffalo, have avoided their father for so long, they don’t even know he’s living in Sun City, Arizona. Once they arrive, though, they realize there’s no choice but to bring him back to New York and put him into a nursing home.

Jon, the more pragmatic of the siblings, proves also to be the more capable, too, at least in his career. A PhD, he’s working on a book about an obscure playwright. Wendy works as a temp while chasing dreams of actually becoming a playwright and scamming FEMA for 9/11 grants. This doesn’t even touch upon their personal lives, which neither seems emotionally capable of managing; he lets his Polish girlfriend of three years move back to Poland instead of marrying her, while she’s banging her married, entirely unavailable neighbor.

Despite their dysfunctions, though, Jon and Wendy don’t walk away from their father. Despite how truly self-involved both of them are, they set aside their lives to care for this miserable man who probably hates them and, even worse, probably expects them to take care of him anyways. It’s a scary vision of what we all will have to face as our parents drift into the tail end of their lives, of what we all will have to face as our own lives deteriorate and we have to turn to others for help. Jenkins knows the material well and has crafted a deeply personal emotional memoir of death here; it’s just too bad she wasn’t able to make it feel more alive.

Grade: C+

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