Tamara Jenkins' film deals point blank with a question that is going to become more and more pressing as the Baby Boom generation makes its relentless march towards senescence: what do adult children do when their parents are no longer able to take care of themselves? Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney play a couple of theater people in arrested development trying to deal with the very grown-up task of dealing with their demented, aged father, a man who abandoned them and who they feel little affection towards. Jenkins depicts the grim, desperate situation with a deadpan realism, sort of Alexander Payne minus the whimsy. Hoffman's character is a drama professor writing a book on Bertoldt Brecht, and Brechtian alienation is at the center of both Jenkins' directorial style and Hoffman's method of coping with life. Hoffman's character is a disengaged intellectual, distanced from his own pain and very life, and the experience of dealing with his more emotionally-open, but still stunted, sister, brings up long suppressed feelings, giving the lie to his self-consciously alienated outlook. The film has a similar effect on the viewer: by creating such vivid dipictions of universal family agonies, the audience is forced to reckon with long dormant feelings and memories.
Score: 8.0
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2 comments:
this is the teacher in me:
how so?
your mom.
Both Caroyln and myself found ourselves flashing back pretty hard to memories of our dying grandparents while we watched this film, mainly because of the lead-pipe, unblinking dipiction of hospital bedrooms, Sun City, Arizona, wintry nursing home parking lots...an emphasis on environment that works on the same level as similar attention to banal detail works in Alexander Payne films.
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