By Rick Grant
A- Rated R 113 min
Writer/director Tamara Jenkins’ screenplay broaches a sensitive subject in today’s world–aging in an ageist, youth-obsessed society unwilling to come to terms with the problems of the elderly. Siblings, Wendy and Jon Savage (Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman) are estranged from their father, Lenny (Philip Bosco), who is living with a woman in Sun City, Arizona. His companion suddenly dies and he is suffering from dementia, which has caused him to act irrationally.
Lenny can no longer stay in the house because he signed an agreement that if his cohabitant died he would not contest the ownership of her home, which the relatives want to sell. So, Wendy and John have to interrupt their lives, fly to Arizona, and deal with their father’s rapidly advancing illness.
Wendy is in her forties and trying to make it as a playwright. She has a day job as a temp to pay the bills, but literary failure is embarrassing to her because her brother, Jon, is professor of theater and the author of numerous books. Wendy is having an affair with a randy married man Larry (Peter Friedman) who has no intention of leaving his wife. She is getting tired of just sex and is secretly desiring a more fulfilling relationship. But Larry satisfies her sexual desires and she can get rid of him quickly, so she can be alone to work on her plays. It’s a relationship of convenience for both of them.
Under normal circumstances, Wendy and Jon would have had difficulty communicating with Lenny, but his illness had exacerbated their bitter differences and made it extremely awkward to talk with him about his living arrangements and his wishes concerning his death. For Wendy, her father’s illness stirred up her guilt about her inability to reach out to him. Jon was more philosophical about the inevitable result of Lenny’s dementia–he would need 24/7 care in a nursing home. Both siblings were forced to face long buried emotions, blocked by years of intellectual thought.
Jenkins gradually builds momentum by escalating the emotional turmoil as Wendy and Jon face hard choices which forces them to look deeply inside themselves and brings them closer as brother and sister. Lenny is in and out of lucidity as he seems confused by all the changes going on around him that he can’t contemplate. He thinks he’s in a hotel, when in fact, he’s in a nursing home.
In a key scene, Jon tells Wendy that the pleasant trappings of the nursing home, such as the landscaping and the decor, are for the relatives to ease their guilt, hiding the reality of death going on everyday inside. Wendy befriends an orderly who tells her they know when death is near because the patients’ feet curl up a few days before.
The focus of Jenkins’ script is how the impending death of their father changes them, jolting them out of their self-absorption and redirecting their energy to thinking about their father’s well being. In so doing, Wendy and Jon see things differently with more compassion and love.
In this masterfully written story, Jenkins suggests that ageism is born from the fear of the unknown among young people. When forty-something offspring have to make arrangements for their elderly parents, they see their own mortality for the first time. It’s both shocking and illuminating to see how they commit to this new phase of their lives determines how they will handle their own old age. Indeed, we learn from all phases of our lives and facing the death of a parent is a profound lesson in humility and understanding what love really means.
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