One of the best moments in The Savages comes at the
beginning when we see Wendy Savage (Laura Linney) filling out a
grant application on an office computer obviously not intended for
such purposes. We watch as she types, describing the play for which
she is soliciting philanthropic support, “my semi-autobiographical
play, Wake Me When It’s Over.” Then she pauses, goes back
and inserts the word “subversive” before “semi-autobiographical.”
It’s a good joke and suggests a certain irony, a certain
self-awareness on the part of writer-director Tamara Jenkins
(The Slums of Beverly Hills). It also implies a promise
that this sense of self-irony will ultimately prevent The
Savages itself from becoming the predictably “subversive,”
semi-autobiographical drama that it is already at this point
threatening to become. This promise is only partly fulfilled.
On the one hand, Wendy is supposed to be seen as part of the
intellectual lumpenproletariat, an unproduced playwright
39 years old who steals office supplies from the places where she
ekes out a living temping and applies for grants everywhere she can
— including FEMA, as she claims to have been traumatized by being
in New York on 9/11. When she unexpectedly gets the FEMA grant, she
tells her brother Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman) it’s a Guggenheim
Fellowship. Her private life is also rather a mess, as she appears
to have no friends or social ties and she his carrying on a
passionless affair with a married man (Peter Friedman) from a
neighboring apartment. This is not a very attractive character,
though she is potentially a very funny one.
On the other hand, it gradually becomes clear that she is meant
to be a Cinderella-like heroine after all. If it is possible to
make that transformation come off, I don’t think it is possible for
Ms. Jenkins to do it by persuading us that the subversive,
semi-autobiographical Wake Me When It’s Over should be
taken seriously. Yet this is what she tries to do. We infer, from
the bit of the play we see, that it is that peculiar sort of
revenge comedy in which the American theatre has long specialized:
namely, an attack by grown children on their parents — especially
brutish fathers wedded to supposedly outdated notions of manliness
— for the way they were raised. And the cliche echoes back through
Ms. Jenkins’s film. How much more interesting if the cliche were
actually treated subversively instead of merely being repeated!
The father in this case is Lenny Savage (Philip Bosco) who, when
the film begins, is living in Sun City, Arizona, with a
female-companion who is stricken with Alzheimer’s disease. When she
dies, her grown children put her house up for sale and force Lenny
onto the hands of Wendy and Jon (I wonder if the names are meant to
suggest an allusion to Peter Pan?), neither of whom
appears to have the slightest filial feeling for the old codger. To
be sure, he is unpleasant enough to make their lack of affection
perfectly understandable — and to confirm the unhappiness of their
upbringing hinted at elsewhere. But both children are middle-class
enough to feel he is a responsibility they cannot just walk away
from.
Jon’s sense of filial obligation is somewhat more vestigial than
Wendy’s. He is also hanging on precariously to a position one or
two steps up the intellectual status-ladder from his younger sister
as a junior faculty member in theatre-studies at a
less-than-distinguished institution of higher learning in Buffalo,
New York, and is writing a book about Bertholt Brecht. He too seems
a lonely sort and is in the process of separating from his
girlfriend, Kasia (Cara Seymour), who is returning to her native
Poland. But he takes charge at the moment of crisis and appears to
have not the slightest compunction about dumping his father in the
cheapest nursing home he can find in Buffalo. Wendy is more
guilt-stricken. “We are horrible, horrible, horrible
people” she says to Jon as they walk out of the nursing home on
their father’s first night there.
Wendy comes to live with Jon for a while in his now-empty house,
which she says looks as if the Unibomber lives there, until dad
settles in. “We’re doing the right thing, Wen,” he reassures her.
“We’re taking better care of the old man than he ever did of us.”
This is one of several references to the deep resentments harbored
by both children against their father, whom they haven’t seen in
years and whose sudden need for their attention comes as an almost
intolerable interruption to their eminently interruptible lives.
Wendy, however, briefly and without success tries to arrange for
his care in a more up-market institution. Her effort is sabotaged
by dad himself whose orneriness seems long to antedate the
infirmities of age which have doubtless exacerbated it.
Dramatically, what wants to happen at this point is that the
kids must learn to look at their father in a different light. There
is even an opening for such a development when (if I read it right)
it is hinted that, even in old age, the old man is bitter about his
own upbringing. But nothing is done with this. Not much else
happens either. Nobody develops or changes, and the film for all
its virtues settles into an unhealthy stagnancy. Its virtues
include both the wit of the writing and fine performances by Miss
Linney and Mr. Hoffman in the principal roles. Mr. Bosco is also
very good as the old man, but he is imprisoned by Ms. Jenkins’s
hatred of him and turned into little more than that familiar
cinematic and dramatic caricature, the bad dad. That we can come
away from this movie with no more sympathy towards or understanding
of the father than his children have is a real dramatic failure, it
seems to me.
At one point, Wendy has a brief flirtation with Jimmy (Gbenga
Akinnagbe) an African-born orderly in the nursing home and asks him
if he would like to read her play. He says he would and, when he
has read it, tells her that he liked it. “You didn’t think it was a
bunch of middle-class whining?” she asks him. “Some spoiled
American complaining about her childhood?”
“Not at all,” he says reassuringly.
Ms. Jenkins is cutting just a little too near the bone here.
Insofar as Wake Me When It’s Over is akin to The
Savages — and that will probably seem to most people pretty
far — it bears a distinctly uncomfortable resemblance to less
artful and less amusing sorts of middle-class whining.
