Search - The Savages on DVD

Frank E. (realartist) from HENDERSONVLLE, NC
Reviewed on 8/27/2009...

It gladdens me after plowing through a number of ho hum scripts to come across a good one.
Mind you...it is not the finest literature you have ever experienced...certainly not poetic,imagistic, soaring intellectually. No this is a slice of real life. What will you and i do when our parents health and mind start to fail?...interrupting our busy, busy lives with our young, hip friends, and amoral sleaze bags with who we normally associate, stupidly. Actually, I've had to do this already. it is a sobering, and profoundly moving experience. At the risk of offending ( ignorant ) atheists...it is far more disturbing when a parent dies who has lived no kind of moral life, and has astutely avoided any and all efforts to draw him or her into the fold that will be allowed into Heaven. Funerals involving 'saved' people are always full of both tears, and joy-even laughter and mirth. But a godless fool?...oooh that is a dark, somber and fearful event indeed. I've been to a number of funerals, and they are all the same.Just as the negro spiritual sings in"Oh Brother Where Art Thou"..."You've got to walk down....that lonesome valley. You've got to walk down...all by yourself"...to meet death. Never mind that a small handful of loved ones are there to hold your hand. That means very little when your soul is 'claimed' by the wrong 'side'. ( it is startling and shocking to me to be so virulently attacked by people on review websites when I make these remarks...I fully expect it again. Almost as though people are 'defending the Dark Side"! The "Satan anti defamation league" in a way !

I greatly admire these two actors. There are none better, i vouch safe. A clue, however, is given when at the 'happy rest home' where her father is dying; she is havign a smoke with a Nigerian staff member outside also having a smoke break. When asked what she does...she explains that she works as a 'temp'..but that's not her main lien of work. She tells him she is a "Theater person". And indeed she is. Laura Linney has been on the stage since her parents were- early on. it IS her life. VEry early in the dialogue, she is seen typing a letter to a list of publishers to try once again to publish her "play". She states in her letter that "This is a semiautobiographical work"...and , folks...I do believe it is Laura Linney's very own. If not...it is something she may well have written.
Her co star, playing her 'brother' says in the last lines, that the play was very good...very good'...suggesting to his friend and colleague that she did well with this "play". This play that we get to see unfold on the screen.
It's not great literature. Nonetheless, what an important subject to cover. My wife works every day with dementia folks. We can all do better...and for this reason this film is most important. Think of yourself, descending into "No Useful Mind"...not even remembering how to defecate, or where the bathroom is!! WE MUST do better...for ourselves, if not for the parents who we have blamed for all of our human failures....for ourselves. ( and we can stop blaming our parents. They also had deplorable, wretched excuses for lives, full of failure and shocking disappointments themselves...interrupted by war, and infidelity...just like our own lives- our own lives characterized by no moral compass or any ethical orientation in particular. Something like what was a running joke on the show "Seinfeld'...endless serial monogamy...with "No consequences"...ha...there are consequences; and we all know it. All we have to do is watch ONE episode of Maury Povich to see that clearly. ( bless Maury Povich for showing us true reality TV. I recommend it. I do give it five stars.

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