Philadelphia Weekly

New Releases

The Savages
Directed by Tamara Jenkins
B+
Reviewed by Sean Burns
Opens Fri., Dec. 21

Grimly funny and brazenly unsentimental, writer/director Tamara Jenkins' follow-up to her raucous 1998 dysfunctional family comedy Slums of Beverly Hills stars Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney as Jon and Wendy Savage, sourpuss siblings forced to face some difficult decisions once their estranged abusive father (Philip Bosco) takes a turn toward dementia. But if you think this is going to be a sweet comedy of familial reconciliation, take another look at that surname.

Hoffman's an emotionally stunted slobbo lit professor in Buffalo, while Linney's an aspiring Greenwich Village playwright (she's actually a temp, living off a FEMA 9/11 grant) carrying on a pathetic affair with her married neighbor. Both seem stuck in a sort of adolescent emotional paralysis, no doubt thanks to dear old Dad, who's recently taken to writing obscenities on bathroom walls with his feces.

Muted in tone and visually buried beneath a brilliantly shabby bargain-basement production design (every prop in the movie looks cheap and possibly broken), The Savages has an ordinary, humdrum grit often missing even from indie movies. The actors' hair is always messy--not as an affectation, but like it was probably combed earlier in the morning but it's been a long day. The more unsavory aspects of contemporary eldercare are confronted in a similarly blunt, low-key fashion, as Jon and Wendy imply most of the family history with a minimum of speechifying--but nonetheless wonder how to take care of an old man who never liked them much in the first place.

Hoffman and Linney are, as usual, extraordinary. Like most siblings facing a crisis, they fall right back into the roles assigned to them in childhood. She becomes overly melodramatic and needy (not to mention kind of full of shit), while he recedes deeper into a know-it-all curmudgeonly security blanket.

There's no grand deathbed catharsis here, and no monologues about lessons learned. When all is said and done, Jon and Wendy have merely slouched ever-so-slightly closer to adulthood, which feels a bit tougher and more true than countless Hallmark Hall of Fame TV movies on the same subject.

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
Directed by Jake Kasdan
B
Reviewed by Matt Prigge
Opens Fri., Dec. 21

The world needs Walk Hard. Bio- pics have had it too good for too long, and any film that parodies the genre's biggest crimes--plodding, this-happened-then-that-happened scripts; rampant lying in order to pound a messy life into a tidy three-act structure; and oodles of Oscar-targeted overacting--deserves accolades simply for showing up, much less with John C. Reilly in the lead and the Judd Apatow mafia behind the camera.

Specifically sending up Ray and Walk the Line, though extending its mockery to the entire vast genre, Walk Hard stars Reilly as Dewey Cox, an aw-shucks everyAmerican musician who has his first popular song at 14--when he's already played by Reilly. The film then follows Reilly through just about every major musical genre from the last five decades. In between he gets addicted to (and quits) every possible drug, fathers a couple dozen spawn and hopelessly tries to patch things up with his estranged papa (Raymond J. Barry), who's eternally peeved at Reilly for accidentally killing his piano-prodigy brother in a childhood machete fight.

In short, Walk Hard is exactly what you'd expect from a feature-length parody of musical biopics starring John C. Reilly. Hypothetically, that should be enough, and I suppose it is. (My ass was effectively laughed off.) But it's hard not to be a touch miffed that it doesn't do anything beyond what's required, never veers off in any particularly gonzo direction. (That said, there are a good deal fewer dick jokes than you'd think.)

Still, it'd be absurd to fault Walk Hard too much for promising to decimate the biopic and then doing just that, and borderline criminal to razz on only the second film to ever put Reilly up front. Go for the premise; stay for the left-field Glen Campbell joke.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Directed by Julian Schnabel
B
Reviewed by Sean Burns
Opens Fri., Dec. 21

Once an incredibly annoying staple of the 1980s New York art scene, Julian Schnabel has blossomed in recent years, stepping behind the camera for a trilogy of exciting and unconventional biopics. As there's often absolutely nothing exciting or unconventional about biopics, this is a welcome development.

By all rights, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly should be your standard Oscar-bait inspirational drivel. Mathieu Almaric (that sly Roman Polanski look-alike who stole every scene in Spielberg's Munich) stars as Jean-Dominique Bauby, an Elle magazine editor and cad about town who suffers a sudden and debilitating stroke, finding himself completely paralyzed, save for one eye. (Write your own My Left Eyelid joke here.)

The screenplay, by Pianist scribe Ronald Harwood, plays the typical triumph-of-the-human-spirit card, focusing on Bauby's emotional rehabilitation, eventual reconciliation with estranged loved ones and the rather awe-inspiringly laborious method he used to pen his memoirs. (An assistant recites letters of the alphabet; Bauby winks his one functioning eye whenever she gets to the right one. Any writer who has trouble with deadlines--ahem--will find these sequences astounding.)

All the expected beats are present and accounted for, including Bauby's tearful chat with his stern, emotionally aloof father (Max Von Sydow, naturally). But The Diving Bell and the Butterfly transcends the sappy trappings thanks to Schnabel's adventurous virtuoso direction. The first chunk of the movie is shot entirely from Bauby's point of view, drifting in and out of focus as doctors hover over the camera discussing their diagnosis. They call it "locked-in syndrome," and for this early terrifying stretch we feel locked in there with him, forced to contemplate the horror of being unable to move or even communicate.