The Savages

There's nothing exactly wrong with this film. Detailing the trials of a middle-aged brother and sister as they come to terms with their elderly father's decline, The Savagesfeatures achingly touching performances from the reliable Laura Linney and the incandescent Philip Seymour Hoffman, writes Donald Clarke.

THE SAVAGES

Directed by Tamara Jenkins. Starring Laura Linney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Philip Bosco, Peter Friedman, David Zayas 15A cert, Cineworld/IFI/Screen, Dublin, 113 min

***

Director Tamara Jenkins, breaking ground for the first time since 1998's Slums of Beverly Hills, imposes a damp majesty on the grim suburban locations, and the film manages an agreeably subtle blend of grim fatalism and wry humour. Few films about failure, death and emotional impotence have been quite so amusing.

For all that, the picture feels disconcertingly familiar throughout. A brief glance at the poster and a consideration of the personnel involved will lead many survivors of American independent cinema to suppose that one of the characters might be an academic and the other could very well be a writer. And so it proves.

Hoffman plays a university lecturer who, following a distressing midnight phone call, is compelled to accompany his sister, an aspiring playwright, to Arizona where their father (a touching Philip Bosco) has succumbed to senile dementia. When the old man's lady friend dies, the siblings are forced to put him in a home. In between his rages and their pathetic attempts to order hopeless lives, clues emerge as to why the three Savages have, to this point, had so little to do with one another.

Tolstoy famously argued that every unhappy family was unhappy in its own way. Clearly Count Leo never sat through The Squid and the Whale, Running with Scissorsor Little Miss Sunshine. The miserable families in those pictures - each of which features at least one academic - all express their discontents through the same combinations of psychological constipation and coiled sarcasm. The Savages is a decent entry to the genre, but, one suspects, the film-makers were trying for something a little more original.

Still, if you have managed to avoid those earlier exercises in creative disharmony then Jenkins's film should suit well enough. Nominated for two Oscars (for Linney and the script), The Savageshas plenty of important things to say. It's just a shame they've been said so often before.