Forgot to mention that a couple of weeks ago, we went out and saw The Savages – the dramedy starring Laura Linney and Phillip Seymour Hoffman about a brother and sister called into service to care for their aged, increasingly infirm father.
(It was a choice between that an There Will Be Blood, and I didn’t quite have the energy to invest in that on that particular evening.)
The most effective element of the film, in my mind,  was the way in which the visuals – primarily the contrasting settings – work. We begin in Sun City, Arizon, brightly lit, clean, full of smiling elders riding golf carts and doing dance routines. Except behind closed doors, they are literally falling apart. Dad’s long-term lady friend dies and he, who has his own problems, is kicked out of the house by her family. So in come daughter and son from New York, and after a bit, they get Dad up and out and settled in Buffalo in a nursing home, where still the effort is made, through loud cheery talk and “activities” to delay the truth, but here in the dark, dreary cold, it is not so easy to do.
There are lots of good lines, a few funny and expressive set-pieces, telling observations and well-drawn minor characters. I mostly enjoyed the film as I was watching it,  although I felt it had a big, gaping hole in it and an fuzzy core.
(But…if there’s a hole, how can there be a core. Oh, never mind…)
Linney and Hoffman’s characters both have strained relationships with their father, whom they have not seen in some time. There is no mother in the picture, and hasn’t been for a long time. There are hints of resentment, “We’re taking better care of him than he ever did of us,” and so on, but nothing more. We really don’t ever know what the dynamic here is – they resent their father and haven’t seen him in ages, but rush down in a nanosecond to care for him, and nothing of what the prior relationship was ever enters into the dynamic between the siblings and the father during the film. What are they angry about? Are they angry at all? What drives them to at the same time speak disparagingly of his care for them, yet try so hard to do well by him at this point?
I’m not saying those elements are necessarily impossible to find in a single relationship, but they merit more explanation than they got in this script. I was fairly constantly distracted by questions of motivation.
The fuzzy core had to do with the Linney and Hoffman characters themselves. They are both, oddly, professionally engaged in drama. He’s a professor (Brecht is his area) and she writes plays while she temps. (One of the best parts of the film is the Hoffman character busting his sister for not, actually, really winning a Guggenheim as she had claimed.) Why in the world are they both in this field? Where does that come from? It provided for interesting minor threads in the film, but in the end, it felt forced, as if there was a Point to be Made about both of these people being engaged in constructing alternate realities out of their own pain (I suppose), and now, in their own middle ages without families of their own, but again, we’re left with…why?
There was a lot dancing around the edges of this film – the American Way of Aging, how children and parents reflect each other and mess each other up, and what we make of all of that when we can’t avoid it anymore, but it was just not developed. Not that it had to be in preachy ways, but it felt like a bit of a loss of nerve at times.
I mostly agree with James Bowman’s review here.  
(As for performances – all were excellent except, if I may dare to say so, Linney – I really don’t get the adulation for her acting. She seems to play the same character repeatedly, although perhaps my mind will be changed by her turn as Abigail Adams. We’ll see.)