The Savages opens with old people acting their age: playing a few holes of golf, aqua-aerobics, and even a dance troupe fitted with matching blue-and-silver leotards. Ideally, this is the way to slip into one’s golden years; at least for one’s kin’s sake. Quickly, however, we are introduced to Leonard Savage (Philip Bosco) eating a bowl of cereal at the Arizona home he shares with his catatonic girlfriend. When Lenny is chastised by an aide for not flushing the toilet, he pulls a de Sade and writes ‘Prick’ on the wall with his excrement. This is how the other half ages.

On the other side of the country, Lenny’s two kids are busying themselves with dead-end jobs while they attempt to become acclaimed writers. Wendy (Laura Linney) temps at data-entry cubicles in New York City, using their copiers and mailing capabilities to apply for prestigious fellowships. She comes home to an answering machine message about her father’s incident and panics. Meanwhile, Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman) teaches at a second-rate Buffalo college as he attempts to finish a book on Bertolt Brecht. When Wendy pleads for help in hunting down their father, Jon responds with lethargic wit: “This is not a Sam Shepard play.”

Jon and Wendy eventually make the trip out west, only to quickly shuttle back to Buffalo to find a suitable retirement residence for their father. As they settle Lenny into the dreary Valley View nursing home, the siblings continue to indulge in seismic slips of conscience. Jon can’t make himself marry his Polish girlfriend before her visa expires and exudes apathy towards his father’s condition, while Wendy struggles to give an above-and-beyond effort for her father. Her relationship with the older, married Larry (Peter Friedman) shows tremors of a born daddy’s girl. She even allows Larry’s dog on the bed while he sweats and groans on top of her.

As she stews in Buffalo, Wendy’s guilt over basically waiting for her father to die is continually impeded by Jon’s ferocious honesty. When she pushes for Greenhill Manor over Valley View, Jon quickly reminds her that the lush surroundings are there to “obscure the miserable fact that people die”. Tamara Jenkins directs these scenes with the knowledge that Wendy and Jon would be better off if Lenny were dead, but there is no calculated cynicism about it; it just happens to be the truth.

Sharply unsentimental and very funny, The Savages lags once Jon and Wendy decide to keep Lenny in Valley View but has a continuing fascination with the tedious and frustrating nature of death, especially the death of an indisputable bastard. Bosco conjures up the aging lout with deft notes of frustration, befuddlement, and just the lightest hint of regret. Matching and often surpassing Bosco, Linney plays Wendy with blazing nervosa and a strangely sexual finesse. Though it is chiefly Linney’s movie, Hoffman cuts through almost every scene with palpable anger and a devastating melancholy.

Director Tamara Jenkins writes with a depth of knowledge about the bruises that family members deal each other. In her fantastic Slums of Beverly Hills, Natasha Lyonne dealt with a family impeding on her sexual growth in 1970’s Hollywood. With the change of address comes a heftier questioning of moral value and familial worth with the inevitable drain of youthful flippancy, and Jenkins rarely averts her gaze from the damage delivered. In her eyes, Jon and Wendy are the poster children for a world where mommy left and daddy stayed to dish out some anguish.

Chris Cabin