We recently saw two very good films that zero in on people in pain. In The Savages, there’s a scene where Philip Seymour Hoffman, having wrenched his neck during a game of tennis (and an argument with his sister Laura Linney about his idiocy in his relationship with a woman), stands with his head bound up in an absurd weighted contraption, meant to “balance” him. Linney looks on and laughs, and he can’t help it–bursts into giggles, too. And ‘though the pain doesn’t go away, not the nerve in his neck nor the loneliness of their lives nor the anguish of their family history and current reality (dad sinking into dementia, and needing to be put in a home), the laugh reframes the pain as less a personal blight than something the two share.
I really loved this film, a brittle character study that bears some family resemblance to Noah Baumbach’s anti-romances of family life, but Tamara Jenkins is far more forgiving–the pain the characters feel, and the laughter evoked throughout, isn’t isolating and alienating (as it is for Baumbach’s characters). This *is* another comedy of humiliation and loss, but it wears its empathy (for every character) on its sleeve.
The film hit me right at home. My grandfather went into assisted care last year right before he died, mind intact but body a friggin’ mess, and I recall him snapping at the solicitous, pissed at this constant embarrassment. A nurse walked in one day and in a sing-songy voice asked if he’d had a bowel movement, and he instantly barked back, “No, have you?” And then he turned to me, and a huge smile broke across his face–and we both laughed. A little aggression, a revelation of pain… these things were unavoidable, but it’s almost like he wanted us to fuck off with the pity, and truly share with him, pain and anger and all.
It was tough because my grandmother was in that stretch a narcissistic harpy–just awful to my mom and my aunts, playing people off one another, actually asking (in one conversation) if we could give my grandfather something to end it all, a comment she passed off (after the outcry) as being for his own good (she broke down sobbing) when it was pretty clear to most of us that she was sick of him grabbing all the attention. In the last year, she’s been intermittently better and worse; some days you remember what was so great about her all your life, and others all you see is how age has fossilized her worst traits and eroded away the softer tissues of her full personality. Philip Bosco’s remarkable performance doesn’t showboat, isn’t oscar-bait–he was heart-breaking and then in the next breath utterly unlikeable. And, watching, I thought… Yeah, that seems about right.
I’m rambling. Jeff liked this, too, but didn’t see as much of a comedy. I guess I see so much generically familiar here: the body crumbling, out of control; the rational unmoored by desire, by memory, by emotions of all stripes; and a profound sense of empathy, and a distaste for sympathy. (For us Wire fans, Gbenga Akinnagbe–Chris Partlow–shows up in a nice, small role as a nurse. Now here’s hoping all those great actors get more than shitty commercials and supporting gigs on the fifty-three Law & Order offshoots.)
Forgetting Sarah Marshall is a helluva lot funnier, and probably isn’t as moving and certainly isn’t as “good” a film–but it’s up to similar tricks, and may be about my favorite of the Apatovian films to come out so far. The best thing about it–what sets it above some of the others–is that we get not only the slew of funny supporting characters but they are not merely there for the funny. They seem deserving of the same kind of pleasurable, unpleasant familiarity–the nauseating recognition of a selfish, foolish act–as the protagonist. I think FSM is far kinder to the women, and Mila Kunis in particular comes off as complex, tough, funny… but the best thing by far is the star (and writer) Jason Segel, who turns prolonged crying jags from the object of scornful derision into the kind of connection Linney showed Hoffman, all trussed up.
I didn’t necessarily say it wasn’t a comedy (despite the lead character’s research interests, The Savages hues closer to Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya filtered through a hardy dose of Camus in its depiction of life’s painfully comic contingencies). The trailer delivers far more laughs. My favorite comic moment is a throwaway scene as Hoffman’s character teaches Brecht’s Epic Theatre to class of undergraduates in the most depressing college classroom in Buffalo (talk about alienation). The Savages is hard as nails and completely unsentimental without veering into grotesque spectacle (which, perhaps, best expresses my response to Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding, a film I liked even though I didn’t recognize and/or identify with any of it’s characters). Enough said. It’s a good film but with the exception of a couple of well earned moments toward the end, it is savagely honest without a hint of preciousness, which is kind of amazing given that its two leads are theatre people. Or maybe it’s just me; I often feel about as lonely as these characters. Perhaps I over-identify.
That being said.
Reynolds needs to write the great American memoir. His beautifully rendered depiction of his grandfather’s final days (not to mention the comic/gothic grandmother with a heart of rusted iron) was far more engaging than anything Jenkins allowed Philip Bosco to play in The Savages. It’s hard to be Reynold’s friend–to desire Reynolds’ friendship–because he is so damn good at everything he does. I don’t know whether to kiss him or stone him . . . mostly I stalk him . . . but I do know his family story is one book I’d buy in hardback.
Cue for Mike to turn my words into an opportunity for a comically grotesque rejoinder, involving bodies and some kind of aberrant sexual act.
wow. please tell me what water you are all drinking in the twin cities and i’ll get me some prontissimo. i’m afraid i’ve got nothing to contribute that even approaches the beauty of mike’s post and the tender longing of jeff’s comment. thanks, both, for the great vulnerability. when jeff and mike make love, the world watches with bated breath.
savages is the film i walked out of on christmas day b/c i was getting too sad for my own sanity. this second time around i decided i’d find the comedy in it, and i did. i laughed straight through the first part — the very same part that had made me so suicidally depressed on christmas (a day that lends itself particularly well to suicidal depression). i worked at finding the old man’s predicament hilarious and, astonishingly, i succeeded. next to me, simon was blocking out more scenes that he was watching. if he hadn’t lived with me for 18 years he’d think i’m bonkers or a heartless perv or both.
i liked the way this movie resisted the urge to Make a Point. i didn’t get from it either the deep meditation on pain that mike talks about or even the loneliness that jeff mentions, even though the latter sort of hits you over the head. i dunno. i was in a different space, maybe a hopeful space, and i saw instead people connecting in all sorts of sweet ways, learning to understand and appreciate each other through tiny gestures of selflessness and goodwill, taking genuine and spontaneous care of each other (family is those people who, when you go to them, they have to take you in), ultimately forgiving each other. since this is an american and not a french movie, the forgiveness is laid on a little too thick — but i can say this only because this movie is so poignantly pointless, so determined to stay out of cliches and closures, that even the slightest hint of sentimental thread-gathering seems a violation.
i wish either jeff or mike talked to me with great eloquence about the theatre element — how performance, making story, telling story, etc. intersect with coming together with your now-senile abusive father and estranged sibling, seeing aforementioned father tenderly through The Great Passage, and confronting the fact that, in your middle age, you are such a major loser. maybe, jeff, you already laid out this connection by mentioning chekov and camus, and the connection is indeed thematic rather than formal — not a matter of linking these vicissitudes with “the theatre” but of seeing a resemblance between selfsame and some specific play or playwright.
i’m happy this movie got made. i’m happy it got made by a woman, so the female half of the siblings was treated with as much respect and dignity as the male half. i wish, though, that the issue of childhood abandonment and abuse had been more than hinted at and, itself, soon abandoned.
It’s safe to say I’ll never be making love to Mike; he’s far too sweaty.
Jeff! You fucking tease!
I’m not going to go further with the theater stuff; I haven’t really processed it, and while I paid some attention it wasn’t central to my viewing.
But I particularly like the point you make, Gio, about people finding connections and learning to appreciate one another (and themselves). Despite a (welcome) small sense of “winning” for both major characters at the end, I was most taken by the the film’s willingness to avoid two common narratives of aging. One, the hidden treasure–you wake up, realize something missing/bad/empty about your life, and try to change or address that, but in the end you return to the wonders of what was there all along. Two, the Norman-Vincent-Peale refutation of loss–you wake up, realize something missing/bad/empty and painful in your life, perhaps just the inevitable recognition of the closing of possibilities that comes as you get older, but you go out and ride a hot-air balloon, have crazy wacky adventures, live life to the fullest, blah blah.
The Savages, on the other hand, seems to accept that aging is loss. It’s a dwindling of chances, it’s a breakdown of the body, it’s change you can’t always (or ever?) control. It’s often a recognition (or a willful, pill-popping, relationship-addled refusal to recognize) that you are nearer to death, more alert (and perhaps susceptible) to pain. And this film allows the recognition yet doesn’t turn into Tragedy, or even melodrama. There’s a kind of almost joyous acceptance… or maybe joyous is overstating it. But what the scene with Hoffman in the truss, or even my grandfather with the intrusive medical questions, meant to me was a comic acceptance of pain. (Not the same thing as surrender.)
I’m being vague. But I think one of the reasons the pain of their childhood remains somewhat distant, glimpsed through fingers in conversations, is that these two have in some ways accepted but not been defined by that pain. And the film is distrustful of (yet another) overdetermined narrative convention, the one where you seek closure or resolve old pains in some kind of triumph at film’s end; I like your point, G, that it’s purposefully pointless. I think the point is that we don’t move away from pain (loneliness, loss), and even perhaps are stuck moving toward it, but are nonetheless not consumed or determined by it. That’s why I found the film so wonderfully comic, in the Kincaidian sense maybe.
Another small point: I don’t think Bosco is not given more room by Jenkins; I think he had a different role, and played it perfectly. My grandfather’s experience wasn’t a loss of self, or any dwindling of self, as much as a self increasingly burdened (and even undone) by the body. Different kind of thing, and perhaps easier to script, to perform, and to watch — we like stories about the scrappy disabled, the vivacious aged. Bodies overcome. What I found kind of unsentimentally perfect in Bosco’s performance was the absence of any hint of such a narrative–no glimpse of a man resisting his body, no glimpse of a man sneaking back up for some (final) moment of redemption. At best, we get the scene in the car where hearing his children screaming at one another he turns down his hearing-aid and stares out the window — he still has his own needs and wants, but he’s closed off from our (and his children’s) attempts to find some external reason for our empathy. We (and they) would kind of like some reaction, some recognition from him that would make their (and our) commitment to watching him more meaningful. Ain’t gonna happen. Instead, we (and they) have to find the meaningfulness in the simple act of caring for him. I found that really powerful.
mike, this is deep and breathtakingly beautiful. i get your point about the joyful acceptance of pain and aging. i don’t think you’re being vague at all. it’s a wonderful lens through which to read this film. i hadn’t connected the dots the linked the dying father and the loser middle-aged children. you do.
the last paragraph, about the absolutely perfect bosco, is dead on (and very insightful). putting myself in the shoes of the patient rather than the caretaker, i have always admired — at the time and in retrospect — the docility of my grandmother in her last months. there is something deeply impressive about someone who gives in to the breaking down of her body and mind, lets herself be helped with simplicity, being neither demanding nor resistant, but, also, knows what she wants and what she needs and can hold on to her dignity in this potentially most undignified time. i kept waiting for the bosco character to “wake up,” but, luckily, he never did. for the most part, he did as he was told, was passive to and receptive of his children’s help, seemed fairly out of it. at the same time, he just didn’t want that red pillow, you know, and that was that. so yeah, bosco’s representation of the old man’s demise, and jenkins’ writing of it, are entirely impressive, and you nail them perfectly.
i just had a bowel movement. oh, how we laughed.
Do you and Sunhee do everything together?