The Savages

DYSFUNCTIONAL families are big business in an American film industry ridiculously bent on exploiting the supposed grim realities that exist in relationships.

Concepts of reality in the self-proclaimed ‘dream-factory,' however, get displaced by characters so ‘quirky' and full of ‘foibles,' it's a wonder any of them can get dressed in the morning.

Worse still, they fill these flicks with so much soggy sentiment, you're never exactly sure whether you're drowning in the slap-in-the-face ‘we love each other really' or their pleading for an Oscar.

Cue – in any order you feel – road trips, group hugs, lessons learnt, country soundtrack, arthouse direction and a pallet of primary colours so bright, even Superman would it find them garish.

And Tamara Jenkins' The Savages opens in much the same sugary vain.

Peggy Lee's I Don't Want To Play In Your Yard echoes over cutesy images of retirement life – cheerful seniors, sun-drenched hedges and a geriatric chorus line emerging from pristine homes.

But underneath this glossy-brochure façade, all is not well. Inside Lenny Savage (Philip Bosco) and Doris Metzger's bungalow, two dignified lives are approaching their undignified ends.

The Little Miss Sunshine world is instantly dismissed as Lenny, chastised by the home help for "not flushing", smears a rude word on the bathroom wall with said unflushed item.

At least it looked like a rude word on first viewing. It could have very easily been the screenplay for Family Guy: Blue Harvest.

This act of defiance swiftly moves The Savages into an unsparing attack on the selfish half-lies that adults use to forgive themselves and into one of the finest films of the year.

When Doris dies, it becomes evident that Lenny's dementia will not allow him to live alone. His estranged children, back east, will have to come and get him.

The golden glow of Arizona is about to give way to the wintry grey of upstate New York in setting up a crisis for his fortysomething kids, Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Wendy (Laura Linney).

Suddenly they both find themselves obliged to deal with dementia head-on. "Does it smell?" Wendy asks Jon about the care home he's found. "They all smell," he replies.

Linney plays New York temp with playwright aspirations, Wendy Savage. Brittle and insecure, she resists real intimacy to fool around with a distressingly ugly and balding married man.

Hoffman plays her brother Jon, a morose professor of drama in who's trying to finish his study of Brecht ("I know everyone's really itching for a book about Bertolt Brecht this holiday season").

That brother and sister are both romantically unfulfilled and mildly addicted to painkillers tells its own story, and Jon's attempt to palm off responsibility on Wendy raises ghosts of sibling rivalry.

"Your life's more portable than mine," he tells her.

"What do you mean by that – like a toilet?"

Jenkins gets all the little details right, too, such as the titles of each sibling's work-in-progress: Wendy's semi-autobiographical play about her childhood is called 'Wake Me Up When It's Over,' while Jon's Brecht book is entitled 'No Laughing Matter.'

We can safely assume these be appearing in Richard and Judy's book club.

I suspect it all could have been a bit of a trial but for the performances of Linney and Seymour Hoffman, two actors at the very top of their game and criminally robbed of Oscars.

It's not often one sees the complicated relationships between adult siblings explored on film, and Jenkins is utterly blessed with two of the finest character actors of the decade.

But it's the film's searing honestly that pushes it above the dross in it's unavoidable truth: it's a bloody nuisance having to look after an ill parent, specifically one who has not earned their children's love.

The scene in which Jon and Wendy leave their father in the care home the first night and walk out into the car park, in particular, accurately distils what any child might feel on "abandoning" a parent – an internal commotion of guilt, relief and misery.

"We're just horrible people," cries Wendy, uselessly and naturally.

But then that's the point. Everything about this film is so natural and so very very real.

It may lack the comedy of say a Woody Allen classic, but Jenkin's solemn piece has a tenderness about these flawed heroes that is so profoundly touching and very moving.

A rare film which, incredibly, actually has something to say.