Director hopes "Savages" delivers comfort

A movie about a pair of adult siblings coping with their elderly father's dementia may not sound like typical holiday fare. But Tamara Jenkins' "The Savages," which has been gathering momentum since its Sundance premiere at the start of the year (it opens in Seattle Tuesday), is a feel-good movie, in its own way. It's been receiving warm praise during its gradual national release, and recently received four Independent Spirit Award nominations and one Golden Globe nomination (for actor Philip Seymour Hoffman).

Writer/director Jenkins, in town last month to present her film, hopes that it will both entertain and comfort those facing similar situations in their own lives. She recalled the many Q&A sessions she's had after screenings of her film. "Somebody always raises their hand — a person around my age [Jenkins is 45] or a little older — and says, 'My mother has Alzheimer's and when the movie started, I got really scared that I wouldn't be able to handle it, and then it was so honest and funny that I am really grateful because I feel less isolated in my own experience.' So that's nice."

"Not to sound pretentious, but that's why art exists," Jenkins continued. "We're kind of out there alone, and then you grab a book and you're reading and something is observed that isn't necessarily discussed, and you feel less alone. Particularly a subject like this — taboo's too extreme a word, but it's something that happens outside the margins of life. Somebody disappears for a while because something's going on with their parent, and then you find out when they come back. It's like a parenthetical."

In the film, siblings Jon (Hoffman) and Wendy Savage (Laura Linney) are busy leading complicated New York literary lives (he's a professor, she's a struggling playwright) when they learn that their ailing father Lenny (Philip Bosco) can no longer take care of himself. The relationship between the trio has long been prickly, but the siblings rally to collect their father from his Southwest home, bring him back East and settle him in a nursing home. Though there's much dark humor in the film — and though Jon and Wendy do come to a better understanding of each other — the father's troubled relationship with his children is never really mended.

"That's a Hollywood movie moment that doesn't happen in real life," said Jenkins. "This redemptive moment, this dad turning around in his hospital bed and saying, 'I'm sorry I wasn't a great father but I always loved you.' It happens in movies all the time. It's missing from my movie because it's false. He has dementia, he doesn't even know who he is. I find it very alienating when I am force-fed this kind of dishonest saccharine when I know that it's not true. It makes me feel isolated as a human being."

Jenkins, whose previous film was the 1998 comedy "Slums of Beverly Hills," said that while "The Savages" isn't a memoir, there are elements of her own life in the screenplay. Both her father and grandmother, she said, suffered from dementia and spent their last years in nursing homes.

The scene in the movie in which Wendy flies to the East Coast with her confused, frail father is, Jenkins said, from her own life, and was in fact a seed for the film. "I had to fly him across the U.S. when he was old and unwell and I didn't really know — the gravity of the task did not occur to me," she said. "Not that I was cavalier, but I was like, 'Yeah, sure, I can do this.' " Jenkins told that story several years ago in the New York performance forum The Moth, as part of an anthologized evening of oral storytelling under the theme of "family." Though she was already at work on the screenplay at the time, she was still seeking a focus. Producer Ted Hope came to the Moth performance and told Jenkins he could see a movie there — something dark and serious, but with humor braided into it.

"In terms of getting [the movie] financed, it wasn't easy — there was a desire to soften it," said Jenkins. "The people are very flawed, and it's not a story about heroes, it's a story about ordinary people. They're not ordinary in that their occupations are maybe more rarefied, but they're ordinary in that they're wildly imperfect and they're confronting something — there's no guidebook as to how to deal with this stuff. It's very lonely.

"But there's so much humor, I feel like on the underside of tragedy there is this human farce playing at the same time. People are at these extremes, they're in a survival mode, and there's no polite way of handling it because they're being pushed against something so extreme." She cites the image of Charlie Chaplin in a rowboat sinking, facing death and frantically bailing with his shoe — it's comedy in the face of tragedy. "It's this scrappy survivalness that makes the humor come out of those sorts of things."

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com