The Familiar Familial Fractures of The Savages

I haven’t spoken to my sister in 13 years. That still feels odd to say. Thirteen years. I can vividly remember the sensation of her hand wrapped around my neck, her nails digging deep into my throat, and wondering how I was going to get myself to a place of safety. Whenever I start to consider an attempt to reforge our relationship, that’s immediately what my mind goes back to. I can’t shake it.

We always bring ourselves into the films that we watch, experiencing them through the lens of our own histories and relationships with the world, so it makes sense that anytime I’m watching a story centered around a sibling relationship, my sister is heavy on my mind. Often it’s a feeling of jealousy, a pang of ache because the film is focused on siblings who have an affection and a bond between them that I was never able to feel. Sometimes, though, there’s a film that hits particularly deep due to the complicated, messy nature of that dynamic, as is the case with Tamara Jenkins’ 2007 feature, The Savages.

The relationship in the film between Wendy (Laura Linney) and her older brother Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman) doesn’t exactly reflect my own. While we don’t get much backstory on how these two became somewhat estranged, it does seem like there was a base level of connection between them in their early days. That hadn’t been the case for me. We’ll skip the many years of minute details, but the gist is that things weren’t great for us growing up. A few years ago, I was asked by a therapist “When was a time you can remember your family being happy together?” and as hard as I tried, I couldn’t conjure up a single instance. I’ve always maintained to my mother that the best thing my parents did for me and my sister was to get divorced. It was the first moment where I thought, maybe, I could breathe. After 14 or so years of hearing them fight, there was at last a little reprieve.

The difficulties took a different path from there, however, as my father moved to a different state and my mother was working all hours while trying to raise two teenagers more or less on her own, along with going through her personal mourning and healing process after finally getting out of a decades-long abusive marriage. My sister, who’s almost four years older than me, and I were left to fend for ourselves in many ways, especially when it came to emotional grappling with everything our childhoods had unloaded on us. The results? Not too pretty.

She acted out by constantly bringing home myriad friends and pets without asking the consent of anyone else, so consumed with her own perspective that she had no regard for others—the case for all of us in the family, who resorted to looking after ourselves first and foremost. I continued to do what I had learned from the many nights of hearing my parents shouting at each other right outside my door: I isolated, quiet and alone in my room. Things were destined to come to a boiling point. Our lifestyles clashed and we didn’t have any examples of healthy conflict resolution. One night, I brought home a girlfriend that my sister demanded I get out of the house. When I refused, things became violent.

After the incident, I snuck out my window and went to stay at a friend’s house. I remained there until my parents finally sold our house and I was able to move into an apartment with my mom, while my sister went to live with my dad. It was the last time I spoke with my sister. I’m 32 years old now, and still not sure when or if that’ll ever change.

Watching The Savages, as I’ve done many times since first seeing it in theaters (with my mother, no less), is a guarantee to drum up the many feelings and questions I have about my relationship with my sister. Wendy and Jon didn’t have quite the dramatic falling out that my sister and I did, yet their story isn’t too dissimilar: An abusive father, a mother who wasn’t around to help them in the fallout, and many years of distance. Both siblings moved on with their lives and retreated into their own worlds, their trauma rendering them incapable of feeling any sense of family. They’re so disconnected from their blood that an event most people spend years preparing for comes as a seismic shock to the two of them.

Jenkins’ film looms even larger for me considering how this event, the film’s main narrative thrust, revolves around a transition in life that may just be the most likely scenario in which my sister and I finally have to communicate again. When their father Lenny (Philip Bosco) slips into dementia, and his girlfriend he’s living with passes, Wendy wakes Jon up in the middle of the night. Their father is writing on the walls with his shit and the two New Yorkers must go to Arizona, where he’s been living for 20 years, to pick him up and figure out what to do with him. “Don’t leave me alone with this,” Wendy pleads.

The Savages follows not only their journey to find a facility that will house their father and give him some level of care and comfort that they don’t have the capacity to provide, but also their emotional journey. They must reconcile with having to take care of a man who caused them so much pain—to the point where they’ve barely spoken to him in years, and clearly struggle to form any kind of relationships in their personal lives. Wendy is having an affair with a married man living in her building. Jon has been living with his girlfriend for three years, but her visa is expiring and she’s moving back to Poland because he simply refuses to marry her.

I certainly had a “my parents are young and strong and going to live forever” mentality until I hit that big 30, when, immediately, it began to settle in that I’m getting older and so are they. Particularly after watching my mother and her siblings going through the process of figuring out how to care for their parents, both of whom have suffered from dementia, mortality often rattles around in my brain these days—a perpetual fear of how I’m going to help take care of them when I still haven’t figured out how to take care of myself.

The Savages explores this passage in life in exquisite detail, with Jenkins (whose parents both had dementia and were in nursing homes late in their lives) making a concerted effort to not doll her film up with the schmaltz and sentimentality that Hollywood films tackling this subject matter often drench themselves in. Her film is scabrously funny at times, but even the humor comes from its reckoning with the ugliness of life.