Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney realize that nursing-home buffets suck Andrew Schwartz The Savages Written and directed by Tamara Jenkins Fox Searchlight, opens November 28 more film most popular most commented Frontière(s) Tracking Shots by Jim Ridley Merchant Ivory's Before the Rains Tracking Shots by Julia Wallace A Previous Engagement Tracking Shots by TATYANA GERSHKOVICH Unsettled Tracking Shots by Michelle Orange The Tracey Fragments Tracking Shots by Aaron Hillis NYPD Inaction Over a Missing Black Woman Found Dead Sparks a Historic Racial-Bias Lawsuit by Sean Gardiner Why Can't I Leave My Boyfriend Tied Up While I Go the Movies? Savage Love by Dan Savage Speed Racer by J. Hoberman The NYPD's Secret Crusade Against Marijuana Furthers a Racist Agenda by Nat Hentoff Mass Arrests at Sean Bell Protest NYPD Inaction Over a Missing Black Woman Found Dead Sparks a Historic Racial-Bias Lawsuit (9) Sean Gardiner Former Scientologist Actor Wants his Confessional Files Back (8) Tony Ortega Dirty Blonde: Brooklyn, a Place to Impress Strangers (4) Dirty Blonde: Annie Fischer Runnin' Scared: Deep South of Houston: Is a Soul-Food Restaurant Too Black for Soho? (3) Runnin' Scared: Chloe A. Hilliard David Mamet: Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal' (3) David Mamet

It's hard to imagine a more potent test of family solidarity than the decision-making process regarding what to do with a sick and helpless relative. Some rally heroically—in a moving instance of life mimicking Away From Her, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor recently gave an understanding thumbs-up to the romance between her Alzheimer's-afflicted husband and a woman in his nursing home. But many collapse under the strain—and if you saw Jenkins's heavily autobiographical 1998 cult-hit comedy Slums of Beverly Hills, you won't be expecting serene self-sacrifice from Wendy and Jon Savage (Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman), middle-aged siblings whose relationship with one another and their fast-fading dad Lenny (Philip Bosco) strains the very definition of family, never mind adulthood.

An instinctive provocateur, Jenkins gleefully rubs the more graphic symptoms of dementia in our faces—as well she should, given the emotional fallout of dealing with a man who covers a bathroom wall with his own feces. But the movie also comes with the wistful sadness of a maturing filmmaker who understands that in matters of death, sorrow and black comedy often walk hand in hand.

The Savages opens under insanely blue skies in the retirement village of Sun City, Arizona, with a bunch of senior ladies capering about in electric-blue cheerleading outfits, a scene of pure goofiness slyly offset on the soundtrack by a plaintive Peggy Lee singing "I Don't Want to Play in Your Yard"—an unadorned anthem to human neediness in general and sibling rivalry in particular. Estranged from their overbearing father and a mother who checked out early, Jon and Wendy delude themselves into believing that they've cut the family cord and moved on with their lives. In reality, Wendy's a stalled East Village playwright (a/k/a temp) wasting her time in an affair with her married neighbor, while Jon, a Buffalo college professor who cranks out pomo-lit papers no one will ever read, refuses to marry his Polish girlfriend even though he weeps when she makes him eggs. Trapped in extended adolescence, the two rattle around their separate but equally cramped lives, which grow a slight more cramped when a nocturnal phone call informs Wendy that Dad has flunked out of his retirement home.

Chickens flap home to roost as Wendy and Jon move their recalcitrant father to a dreary East Coast facility, where he confounds their every effort to take instruction from Elder Care for Dummies. Bosco gives a hilariously physical performance, but at its core The Savages is about a brother and sister who have been hopelessly failed in the parenting department, and misbehave accordingly. Linney has always been a natural at playing tightly wound women on the verge, and there's something inexpressibly moving about watching her child-woman in ringlets come apart as she overcompensates for her withdrawn brother and lies through her teeth to upstage him. Watching their father die, the pointedly named Savages make a perfectly synchronized emotional seesaw: a rabid squirrel trying to get a rise out of a grumpy bear.

Jenkins is no sentimentalist, and she won't patronize her benighted losers or her audience with epiphanies, apologies, or blinding insights. Yet the movie is dotted with moments of grace and whacked-out humor that got me on board for this damaged duo's liberation. Theirs is a hesitant growing up that feels less like a sop to distributors wary of the bummer ending than a goofy act of tender mercy by a director who's moved on from the simple desire to shock.