Film

The Savages

Name: The Savages
Genre: Drama, Comedy
Released: 2007
Cast: Laura Linney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Philip Bosco, Peter Friedman, David Zayas

The Savages follows two middle-aged siblings, one a struggling playwright, the other an academic, pulled back together when their long-estranged father's dementia forces a decision neither wants to make. Tamara Jenkins finds comedy in nursing-home beige and casserole dishes without ever mocking the situation itself — this is for anyone who wants family dysfunction handled with intelligence, restraint, and no sentimentality.

TMDb rating

6.9

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You Can Count on Me2000

Laura Linney again, this time squaring off with Mark Ruffalo as siblings whose loyalty is tested less by illness than by each other's bad decisions — the same clear-eyed tenderness Jenkins brings, minus the nursing home.

But Its stakes are smaller and quieter than The Savages — no ticking clock, just the slow work of two people learning to forgive each other.

The Father2020

Where The Savages watches dementia from outside, this one drags you inside it — Anthony Hopkins disintegrating in real time as rooms and faces rearrange themselves without warning.

But It's formally disorienting by design, which makes for a genuinely unsettling watch rather than a comforting one.

Nebraska2013

Alexander Payne's black-and-white road movie has the same deadpan comic instinct — a son hauling a difficult, declining father across the Midwest and discovering who the old man actually was.

But It's slower and more meandering, with humor so dry it can read as cold if you're not tuned to Payne's frequency.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Dick Johnson Is Dead2020

It's the nonfiction mirror of Wendy and Jon's exact situation — a child filming instead of writing plays, using invention and dark humor to survive watching a parent disappear.

Kirsten Johnson filmed her own father's dementia as it happened, staging his death over and over in absurd, tender ways to practice losing him before she actually did.

But It's real, unstaged decline captured on camera, which some viewers will find harder to sit through than any fictionalized version.

Please Give2010no page yet

Nicole Holofcener's ensemble comedy shares that same guilty, self-aware discomfort about what we owe difficult elderly relatives, and how good intentions curdle into resentment.

But It's busier and more diffuse, splitting focus across several families instead of sitting with one.

The Descendants2011

Payne again, this time with George Clooney managing a dying wife, unruly daughters, and a Hawaiian real-estate deal — grief handled with the same wry, exhausted humor.

But The tropical scenery and bigger emotional swings give it a warmer, more conventionally moving shape than Jenkins' film.

A Real Pain2024no page yet

Jesse Eisenberg's cousins-not-siblings comedy has that same prickly, loving irritation between two people who share history but not temperament, traveling together under obligation.

But It trades illness and mortality for grief and inherited trauma, so the emotional register is a little different despite the similar bicker-and-bond structure.

Away from Her2007

Julie Christie's descent into Alzheimer's, seen through her husband's eyes, is a quieter, sadder cousin to The Savages — the same unglamorous honesty about what illness does to love.

But It's a slower, more purely tragic film, without much of the Savages' gallows humor to leaven it.

Still Alice2014

Julianne Moore's Oscar-winning turn as a linguistics professor with early-onset Alzheimer's puts the disease itself in the spotlight in a way Jenkins' film, told from the children's side, never does.

But It's more conventionally tearjerking, using the disease's progression for dramatic clarity rather than lived-in mess.

Marriage Story2019

Same institutional dread, same brittle comedy of process — here it's divorce lawyers instead of nursing-home paperwork, but the sense of adults being infantilized by systems feels identical.

But It's about a marriage ending rather than a parent declining, so the specific ache of The Savages — mortality, debt to a difficult parent — isn't really there.

Tokyo Story1953

This is essentially the film that invented the genre The Savages belongs to: adult children failing, gently and humanly, to give their aging parents what they need.

Ozu's masterpiece about elderly parents visiting their too-busy adult children moves at a completely different pace, but it's asking the exact question The Savages asks about duty, distance, and disappointment.

But It's slow, formal, Japanese cinema of a very different era — patience is required, and there's none of Jenkins' comic relief.

Death at a Funeral2007

It takes the same family-logistics-of-a-parent's-decline setup and plays it as farce instead of melancholy comedy, proving the scenario is elastic enough to hold both registers.

Same premise — squabbling siblings, a dead or dying parent, unresolved resentment surfacing at the worst possible moment — but cranked up into full farce with drugs, secrets, and slapstick chaos.

But It's broad, silly, and occasionally crude where The Savages is restrained — comfort-comedy rather than anything resembling honesty.