Comedic turns lighten honest 'Savages'
• "The Savages" provides us with an unvarnished account of how a brother and sister deal with an aging dad subject to bouts of dementia and forgetfulness. This might be a tad too much reality for the festive holiday season, but writer/director Tamara Jenkins creates an utterly realistic script that allows three supremely gifted actors to show their stuff.
When elderly Lenny Savage (Broadway favorite Philip Bosco) loses his significant other and then smears feces on the bathroom walls in his retirement home, his two kids get a call to take him away.
New Yorker Wendy Savage (Laura Linney) is a single wannabe playwright. For money, she works as a temp. For companionship, she does the dance of the wild bunnies with a married neighbor.
Her neurotic brother Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman) teaches college philosophy while writing extreme niche books for academics.
The siblings meet to discuss what to do, and as expected, each has reasons why the other should take care of Lenny. This isn't a plot-laden movie, but Jenkins, who last gave us the little gem "Slums of Beverly Hills," prefers moments of raw emotional honesty to mind-tripping reversals and complications.
"The Savages" has plenty of these honest moments. Reliable character actor Bosco captures the on/off personality of a fading father. Both Linney and Hoffman finesse their toughest roles of 2007, although they're not as memorable as their more flamboyant characters: Linney's brittle New York mom in "The Nanny Diaries" and Hoffman's effusive, power-driver men in "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" and "Charlie Wilson's War."
"The Savages" has several welcome instances of humorous relief to lighten up this necessarily heavy subject, but is it a comedy? Well, Hoffman picked up a Golden Globe nomination for this film, listed as a comedy.
"The Savages" opens today at Pipers Alley in Chicago, the Evanston CineArts 6 and Renaissance Place in Highland Park. Rated R (language). 114 minutes. ...½
• I don't normally rip on other movie critics as a rule, but when I saw Rex Reed's quote about "Man in the Chair," I about fell out of mine. Reed called it a "once-in-a-blue-moon kind of movie that celebrates the best qualities in people and makes you applaud the human race." I can only guess that Reed left the room during the part where a young, wannabe filmmaker hero and his grizzled mentor -- one of the crew on the 1941 production of "Citizen Kane" -- are so intent on winning a movie contest that they blow up and burn the equipment belonging to a rival team.
Excuse me, but sabotaging an opponent to gain an advantage? Isn't that typically a sleazy tactic employed by the villain of a story? This lapse of ethics is treated as a joke in "Man in the Chair," and I wondered if this is why Reed said I should applaud the human race.
Otherwise, writer/director Michael Schroeder strives to make "Man in the Chair" a feel-good After School Special that unites vintage Hollywood with the digital age. A lost LA adolescent named Cameron (Michael Angarano) befriends a curmudgeon named Flash Madden (Christopher Plummer in cranky perfection). Turns out that Orson Welles himself gave Flash his name, and he has worked on classic films.
After some token resistance, the alcoholic Flash agrees to help Cameron make a film short to win a contest over a wealthy school bully (Taber Schroeder) who says Cameron and his low-income pals "don't matter."
With class conflict in full bloom, Flash brings in reinforcements: several retired co-workers, including Oscar-winning screenwriter Mickey Hopkins (M. Emmet Walsh), who lives in such squalor that Cameron gets inspired to make a movie about it.
Plummer proves that he doesn't need dentures to chew the scenery. He's the prize in this drama where good intentions and warm fuzzies don't quite surmount made-for-TV sensibilities and questionable ethical acts.
"Man in the Chair" opens today at the Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago. Rated PG-13 (language). 109 minutes.
. .½
• Julian Schnabel's "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" tackles the virtually impossible task of visually re-creating what it feels like to be trapped in the body of a stroke victim with a fully functional mind, intact emotions and control over a single eyelid. Through the use of this single eye, French Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby created the memoir upon which Schnabel based his remarkable movie.
"Diving Bell" opens from Bauby's point of view as his bandages are removed soon after his stroke. For the first 20 minutes or so, we see the world through the narrow view of Bauby's eyes as his family and co-workers arrive to offer the incapacitated editor comfort and support.
Eventually, Schnabel throws the narrative into a standard omniscient perspective, and although that might have been necessary for story-telling purposes, I found that it pulled me out of the movie's immediate intimacy, something it never quite recovers.
Bauby, who died three days after the publication of his memoir, is played by "Munich" star Mathieu Amalric, whose restrained performance matches the gut-punching realism of Daniel Day-Lewis' portrait of a physically arrested man in "My Left Foot." (Amalric will also star in the next 007 film.)
Nonetheless, this movie mostly belongs to artist-turned-director Schnabel, whose vibrant cinematic sense liberates Bauby's experience from mere words and transports us into his mind, turning and churning with guilt, remorse, fear, gratitude and love. This drama runs a visual gamut from concrete imagery to flights of fancy, including fragments of memories and hallucinatory flashes of imagination, all captured in stunning footage by the camera of former Chicagoan and Columbia College grad Janusz Kaminski.
"The Diving Bell," in French with subtitles, opens today at the Century Centre in Chicago. Rated PG-13 (nudity, sexual situations, language). 114 minutes. ...½