Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney are the semi-estranged siblings Jon and Wendy Savage, whose father (Philip Bosco)—a difficult, irascible dad to begin with—is descending into dementia. He’d been living with his partner in Sun City, but when she dies his kids have to figure out what to do with him. They are not well equipped for the job, having enough trouble navigating their own floundering, self-absorbed lives. Wendy is a failed playwright in New York, surviving on temp jobs and unhappily conducting an affair with a married man (Peter Friedman). Jon’s a professor in Buffalo, struggling to finish a book on Brecht and unable to commit to his Polish girlfriend. Thrown together by the crisis—which each deals with in radically different ways, her desperate, shaky optimism bouncing off his emotional detachment—they’re forced to deal with their own arrested adolescence, as well as their father’s looming death.
It sounds grimmer than it plays, thanks to Jenkins’s sardonic, deadpan humor and the superb cast, who invest these damaged characters with rich, flawed, hilarious humanity. This bittersweet X-ray of American family dynamics may not be a Hallmark-card notion of a holiday movie, but it’s one any son or daughter can take to heart.
