The oft-quoted opening lines of Tolstoy's classic Anna Karenina, "Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," seem to have become the starting point for all indie films hoping to breach mainstream audiences. It's the main thrust behind last year's Oscar-winning Little Miss Sunshine, the bread-and-butter of pretty much everything Wes Anderson has done in the past few years (The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic, and The Darjeeling Limited), and, in its most recent incantation, the plot of The Savages, the latest from director Tamara Jenkins.
The problem is, Tolstoy was wrong. The central components of unhappiness in all these tales -- insecurity, loss, realization of one's own mortality, failing to live up to expectations -- are the very essence of what moviegoers identify with. It's our common experiences of unhappiness that draw us to these films, but rather than exploring those similarities by developing complex characters who reflect that commonality, they create characters with odd personality traits and a false pretense that everyone's struggles are inherently unique. And in the latest iteration of this trend, The Savages takes what could be a film about how we as a society deal with our aging family members and instead makes it another tired two-hour character sketch of quirky siblings as they confront their personal situation, isolated from any greater narrative, following the model used in Jenkins' 1998 film, Slums of Beverly Hills.
The film follows Jon and Wendy Savage (played by the well-cast Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney) as they take on the task of caring for their aging father, Lenny, who has been largely absent from their lives. Lenny is left in their care after his girlfriend of 20 years drops dead in a nail salon. Jon and Wendy -- names borrowed from the children in Peter Pan who are condemned to grow up -- are vaulted from their self-interested lives, she as an aspiring playwright in New York City and he as a professor of theater in Buffalo, where each chooses to revel in the drama of social unrest, as Wendy terms it, removing themselves from the unrest of real life. Wendy does temp work while writing her semi-autobiographical play and carrying on an unenthusiastic affair with her married neighbor, and has a tendency to lie about things like winning fellowships and the results of her pap smear. Jon is busy authoring a book on the dark comedy of Bertolt Brecht and alienating his Polish girlfriend by refusing to marry her, even though her visa is about to expire.
But then they find themselves in sun-drenched Arizona, where their father has recently been diagnosed with dementia. There is subtle implication throughout the film that Lenny was abusive during their childhood (though it's never clearly stated until near the conclusion), and that they haven't seen their father in decades. Their mother fled the scene years ago, leaving the pair alone to care for a man they barely know. Their first encounter with their father focuses not on him, but on the dripping catheter below him and the obvious discomfort his children share in being forced to view his urination. The catheter scene is indicative of the direction of the entire film, focusing not on the aging parent or real character development that examines the affect of his death on his children, but on the personality tics of these siblings' lives as their father dies in the background.
The theme continues as Wendy prepares her father for their flight to Buffalo, pulling off the suspenders the nurses have dressed him in because they make him look "like Grandpa Waldman," which clearly unsettles her more than it bothers Lenny, and later results in his pants falling to the floor as he walks to the bathroom on the airplane. Later, as Wendy and Jon meet with the nursing home administrator to discuss their father, Wendy interjects "Hey, I take that!" pointing to the pen labeled with the brand name of an anti-anxiety medication. When their lives get to be too much, Jon and Wendy are quick to pop the Percocets swiped from the medicine cabinet of their father's dead girlfriend so they can forget all about it. There are also several nods to War-on-Terror anxieties , as Jon reassures Wendy that they're only in the yellow-level danger zone with their father, and later as she admits to taking money from FEMA because she was "affected" by 9-11, which further the impression of Jon and Wendy as entirely self-consumed, products of a society that's fearful and isolated. But outside of their neuroses, Jon and Wendy remain mostly underdeveloped characters. Why won't Jon marry his girlfriend? Why is Wendy sleeping a married man? The only explanation: they're oddballs!
All of the focus on the quirkiness of his children leaves Lenny's character undeveloped as well. . At the beginning of the film, he's able to live on his own, despite the beginning signs of dementia. His children keep their distance, and only seem to address him directly when they need to discuss funeral arrangements. "What the hell kind of hotel is this?" asks Lenny, clearly never tipped off to the fact that he's been placed in long-term care. Later, in an interview with a hospital staffer, he's asked what town he's in, all he knows to tell her is "the East Coast," as it's the only place he's overheard others mention. He's in control of his faculties enough to turn off his hearing aid to block out his bickering progeny, but at no point is there an attempt to make Lenny more than a vehicle for his children's quirks, miseries, and self-important reflections on their own mortality. There's a point where his reaction to an old black-and-white film seems to indicate that he, too, was abused as a child, but it's only a passing mention that is never woven into the underlying story about Jon and Wendy's childhood.
So what we get is not a story about a dysfunctional family figuring out how to deal compassionately with their aging parent -- something many of us can identify with -- but a story about how the lives of these two idiosyncratic individuals are affected by a the impending death of some guy with whom they share genetic material. While films are by nature episodic glances into fictionalized versions of our own everyday lives, the problem lies in that independent films of late seem to be stuck on making movies about relevant issues into self-important, individualized narratives about the main characters rather than acute reflections on society. Done differently, a film like The Savages could have been a story about confronting a parent's mortality and the complexities of family relationships. Instead, it's a film about Jon and Wendy Savage's quirks.
It's something we also see in the recent indie hit Juno, a film about a teenage girl who becomes pregnant and decides to let a couple she finds in the PennySaver adopt her baby. While the movie gives more space to the choices for an unplanned pregnancy than others of late (see: Knocked Up and Waitress), her decision to carry the baby is based not on any weighing of the options, but simply because she marches to the beat of her own (punk-rock) drum and wants to do something rebellious. In doing so, Juno, too, relies on the singularity of its lead and the oddities of those around her rather than developing characters who have a depth beyond lovable quirks or using those characters as a vehicle for wider criticism of society. The film also contains a deplorable scene of an abortion clinic made up to be the very worst of what the anti-choice crowd wants the public believe they are, which makes it impossible for the film to honestly explore the options the lead has available in dealing with her pregnancy and prevents it from offering much in the way of social critique.
What viewers are left with in these films is not a glimpse into how each particular tale relates to major issues of today, like dealing with aging parents or unplanned pregnancies, but a shallow look at how these issues affect the individual characters. There are a few redeeming points in The Savages, most notably Hoffman's powerful monologue on the inevitability of death delivered in the parking lot of a nursing home and Linney's obsessing over whether her stageplay is "self-important and bourgeois," which seem to indicate that director Jenkins is well aware of the greater story at hand. But being aware of the issue isn't enough. Viewers turn to independent films like these to find the social commentary absent from most of the fare on the big-screen, not merely to spend a few hours mired in the problems hyper-self-obsessed fictional characters.
