Advance Movie Screening: Savages

Posted on 15 January 2008

I went to see a free advance screening of Savages courtesy of Fox Searchlight last night at the Suncoast. I found this free screening at The Movie Outsider, where I check for other offers daily.

I had no idea what Savages was about when I went to the theater. Well, it turns out that the last name of the family portrayed in the movie is Savage.

Savages follows the dysfunctional Savage family. Wendy is a neurotic, self involved thirty nine year old who is having a passionate affair with a married man. And there’s Ben a sluggish, self-involved forty two year old whose girlfriend of three years’ visa has just expired, and yet he won’t marry her because he feels their relationship is “just not at that level” yet.

She lives in Manhattan, he in Buffalo. But their lives take a sudden turn when their elder father’s girlfriend of twenty years dies, and they get an unexpected call informing them that their father is slowly being consumed by dementia and they are the only ones that can help.

Wendy and Ben now must now pull together and take care of a man that hardly took care of them, and now can hardly remember them. They are forced to put their lives on hold, and live together for the first time since childhood, rediscovering the eccentricities that drove each other crazy. Faced with complete upheaval and battling over how to handle their father’s final days, they are confronted with what adulthood, family and, most surprisingly, each other are really about.

The Savages is both humorous and sad, but in the end is an excellent film.