Hoffman, Linney shine in the brilliant 'Savages'

Meet John (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Wendy Savage (Laura Linney), siblings who have spent their entire adult lives trying to escape the long shadow of their abusive father, Lenny (Philip Bosco).

John is a college professor, incapable of completing his book on Bertolt Brecht or committing to his girlfriend (Cara Seymour). Wendy is an unsuccessful playwright, drifting through an unsatisfying affair with a married man (Peter Friedman). When the two of them get a phone call explaining that their ailing father needs help, they must attempt to pull their lives together and care for him.

So begins Tamara Jenkins' comedy-drama "The Savages" -- a movie that reminds us that, as often as family ties bind, they also have a tendency to suffocate. When Wendy and John travel to Arizona to collect their father (he's been living with his girlfriend), it's been 20 years since they've last seen him. Nor does Lenny want anything to do with his children. But John and Wendy are all he has left, and so a family unit must be re-formed.

The story of "The Savages" isn't really a story at all, just a series of tragicomic episodes that follow the younger Savages as they bring Lenny back to the East Coast and try to find a nursing home for him. Gently paced and photographed in wintry hues (much of the movie takes place in Buffalo), "The Savages" certainly isn't going to be confused for a feel-good romp.

But Jenkins, who wrote and directed the wonderful "Slums of Beverly Hills," shows considerable bravery in tackling the subject of elder care -- an issue that affects almost everyone's life but that American movies have thus far avoided. And she's written these sometimes difficult but always fascinating characters with such intelligence and fearlessness that you come to feel as if you are living life right alongside them.

Not everything about "The Savages" rings true, especially the arch subplot about the overly competitive Wendy fooling John into thinking that she's been awarded a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation. But the extraordinary lead actors keep you glued to your seat: Hoffman creates another indelible, completely lived-in character -- a man who seems to have resigned to himself to the fact that his life is not going to work out as he'd hoped. Linney, meanwhile, offers a complex study of an alternately desperately needy and weirdly cunning woman, who uses her upbeat manner to disguise that she's falling apart on the inside.

If only for the privilege of watching these two peerless talents give two of the best performances of the year, "The Savages" is essential viewing.