The Savages

I have spent some time wondering if The Savages is a "post-Wes Anderson" film or not. You know what I mean: Napoleon Dynamite, Little Miss Sunshine, Garden State, The Squid and the Whale, You Me and Everyone We Know. Although I saw the trailer for this film when I saw the new Wes Anderson film, and although there are some factors arguing for its inclusion in this dubious genre (dubious in more than one way), I have to conclude that The Savages is a more typical "indie" film than all of that.

What do I mean by a typical indie movie? Hokey title sequence? pretentious soundtrack? middle class white intellectuals for characters? impressed with its own cleverness? Yeah, that about covers it.

I tend to like or dislike movies based on how many false moments they have--and this had quite a few. Many of these faux pas could be located in the movie's superiority towards the pettiness and inanity of the world outside of "ours": support groups, nursing homes, office culture, tv commericals, fitness videos, college students, etc. While the experience of stepping into the world can often be profoundly embarrassing, I don't know that I find New Yorker-reading, angsty middle-aged, cold-blooded bourgeois any less embarrassing. The Savages is at its best when it realizes this, presenting John and Wendy Savage as unpleasant, small, people with whom we can only follow warily. This pair of bickering siblings is one pole of a dialectic; the other pole is an obnoxious world filled with death. The movie works best when that dialectic is re-located in the Wendy-John relationship, because the "educated, clever New Yorkers vs. the cheapness of the world" theme drops out, or is more subtly manifested in the personal relation.

The Savages never comes up with a plot, and so at 113 minutes it is exactly 23 minutes too long. I laughed, but I did not cry.