The Savages Is Another Authentically Messy Achievement From Tamara Jenkins

Who exactly are the titular family of The Savages? Well, they're an eclectic group mostly consisting of a father, Lenny (Phillip Bosco) and two adult children named Wendy (Laura Linney) and Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman), with Wendy serving as the stories protagonist. Both Wendy and Jon are trying their best to muddle through their lives when they get the news that their distant father is having extreme issues related to a newly formed case of Dementia in Arizona on the other side of the country. Wendy and Jon bring their father back to their neck of the woods in Buffalo, New York and set him up in a nursing home. As she tries to chart a course for where her life needs to go, Wendy decides to live with Jon so that she can be nearby if their father has any issues.

The Future May Be Uncertain But At Least One Can Be Certain That Private Life Is Exquisite

The way Private Life depicts the day-to-day life of a married couple feels so quietly revolutionary to me in a number of ways. Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) and Richard (Paul Giamatti) have a number of issues to work through but they're mundane issues, the film doesn't drum up conflict by way of having one of them cheat on the other or have one of them go off and spend a whole bunch of money without discussing it with their partner. Private Life is far more interested in exploring the fascinating day-to-day struggles that crop up between the two and how they navigate them as they struggle to have a child and limiting the scope of the film to such a realistically intimate degree turns out to be one of Private Life's most brilliant decisions.