Wednesday, January 9, 2008

"Savage Thoughts" or "How Everything, Even the Oscars, Has Something To Do With Me"


I saw The Savages. Have you? Stop reading if you plan to, because this post has SPOILERS.

It's a movie about a dying family. Mom is gone, dad has dementia, and their two grown kids are midlife and mateless. Wendy Savage (Laura Linney) is a late-thirties MFA grad and "autobiographical playwright" with a sex life limited to an occassional visit from her married neighbor. She lives alone in New York City with a cat, works a sad and unrelated day job, and applies endlessly for grants she won't receive. She is, essentially, the future version of me I'm most terrified of becoming, with one significant difference:

Wendy has a brother.

Jon Savage (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) is a more successful but more depressed upstate philosophy professor, and he meets his sister in Arizona to try and figure out what to do with their non-functioning father, their meager resources, the realization that soon they'll be all that's left of their family.

Let's stop here for a moment. At this point in the movie, about twenty minutes in, I'm a little overwhelmed. I didn't know anything about The Savages - it was just one of those Oscar-list movies I feel obligated to see - and from the title I assumed it was going to be a documentary about the Bush Administration or some snarky comedy about brilliant and narcissistic English academics locked in a death match for tenure.

But it doesn't take me long to realize, no. I was wrong. The Savages isn't nearly so easy. Instead, it's about the person I am most afraid of becoming facing the thing I most fear armed only with the income I fear will be mine.

I felt like I was watching a well-produced nightmare, a futuristic horror show where between the ticket booth and my seat they somehow uploaded my most well-repressed fears, strung them together into a coherant narrative, and got incredibly talented actors to play out every nuance.

All in all, even if you're not me, it's still a pretty despressing film. Wendy and Jon have to warehouse their dad in an east coast nursing home just in time for the holidays, and they fight and bicker and bend under the guilt of not being able to provide for their father. Luckily (unluckily?), the nursing home stay proves to be fleeting. After just a few weeks there, dad dies.

The Savages return to their respective homes. Jon has allowed the deportation of his Polish girlfriend, Wendy has broken it off with her neighbor, and both are banished to the Desert of the Sexless.

Here, thankfully, the movie takes pity on its abused viewer and allows for one of those "light-hearted" tragic-comic endings:

The last scene is a rehersal of Wendy's autobiographical play. In it, an actor playing her father slaps a boy playing her brother again and again, until the boy rises up, angel-like, over stage. Cut to Jon crying in the audience. Cut to Wendy walking him to a cab. He's on his way to Poland, her play was really, really good, and he will be back opening night. They have one of those tender film moments, one of those shared small smiles, in which the audience realizes that they will be ok, that will not kill themlseves, that while life is hard and their parents are dead, at the very least they have each other.

And this is where I started to cry. The happy ending. Because even worse than seeing my failed dreams and dying parents in Technicolor was being reminded that when I get the call, when I go to Arizona, when I research "assisted living facilities" out of my price range, I will be alone. I will be A McLeod. I will have lost my "s," my plurality, the one thing that kept The Savages from being the most depressing movie made since Schindler's List.

GTD from 724***6601:
FWD:FWD:FWD:FWD:FWD: u send fwds u better send this one if u dont u will never get a fwd again and 2008 will suck send to 15 people in the next 10 min HURRY UP!

4 comments:

c. g. said...

i didn't read it because i haven't seen it. but i did read the GTD. wow! an opportunity to NEVER receive FWDs again!!! what rapture!

Anonymous said...

Well....maybe so and maybe no.

I can somewhat relate to your fears and phobias, having long, long ago found myself detached from a disintegrating family and having spent much of my life feeling very alone. In the end, I have found that to have been more about my perspective than my reality.

And, I can promise you this:

If you needed me, I'd be there in an instant, with green tea, and ready cash, and Japanese takeout, and background checks on said nursing home facilities, and airline tickets to needed destinations, and hugs, and a rental car, and time for tears, and help with packing, and, and, and.....you name it, you got it!

You're not alone, sweetie, and as fragmented and despairing as all things familial may seem right now - there are an assortment of wonderful women in your family both young and old - who adore you and cherish you and would assuredly be alongside you at a moments notice, if need be.

PS - I'll email my cell#, just in case.... : )

Anonymous said...

Your brother is gone but from the comments on your posts, you have a large and lovely extended family. When the time comes, they will step up. You won't be alone. They will astonish you and your ideas of family will regroup. And perhaps, when the brutal pain of first years after your brother's death has been blunted a bit - and I promise you it will - perhaps you will use your significant writing gifts to help others understand the many unexpected shapes and places and faces that family takes on.

c. g. said...

am i crazy or does this look a little like Uncle Paul and Aunt Della?