No Oscar season can possibly be without a toxic week of arthouse guilt. Tamara Jenkins’s highly praised but utterly dour family crisis The Savages is an unsparing attack on the selfish half-lies that adults use to forgive themselves. A tubby and not very talented teacher, wonderfully played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, conspires with his neurotic sister (Laura Linney) to park their senile father in a shabby retirement home. The prickly siblings use their father’s growing dementia to fudge their shallow motives. Philip Bosco is marvelous as the gruff and confused father.

The sandpaper comedy derives from the unspeakable truth. Bosco has precious few marbles left. His middle-aged children have no real love for him. Linney and Hoffman spar like disgruntled strangers, but the weary, ancient intimacy between brother and sister is terrific. It’s no great surprise why Linney has earned a Best Actress Oscar nomination.

She wears every one of her loveable failings with a professional sense of doom. Her literary ambition to write a great play is the stuff of fantasy. So too is her scrawny love affair with Peter Friedman’s married and alarmingly bald Larry. Yet she ploughs on.

Jenkins’s solemn comedy may be 389 jokes short of a Woody Allen classic, but there is a tenderness about these flawed heroes that is profoundly touching.

15, 114mins

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