The Savages

I usually watch movies I want to see, but recently I watched one I didn’t - The Savages. The movie tells the story of a brother and sister, Wendy and Jon Savage, who are called to Arizona to fetch their estranged father, Lenny. They arrive in Sun City to find that his girlfriend has died, her kids are taking the house, their father is in the hospital and he may have Parkinsons disease. They haven’t seen him in twenty years. Wendy and Jon (played by Laura Linney and Seymour Philip Hoffman) decide to bring him to Buffalo, New York and they set him up at the Valley View Nursing Home close to Jon’s house. I have avoided watching The Savages because the details of the plot hew a little too closely to my own life in which my father, divorced for the second time after twenty years and living with Parkinsons himself, is moved by my sister and me to an assisted living facility four blocks from my apartment.

After Jon and Wendy put their father in Valley View they visit him almost every day but they never broach the subject of why Lenny abandoned them. Wendy decorates his room, Jon watches old movies, and the rest of the film is filled with scenes of the siblings struggling with their own failed relationships and unrealized dreams. The Savages is incredibly frustrating to watch because it assumes that you can make a movie about a father dying in which the father is just a prop, an excuse for a brother and sister to come together. The siblings argue with each other, lie to each other, attempt to support each other and ultimately to redeem one another, but never, never do they include their father in their drama. He dies quietly as they rage and suffer in orbit around him.

The night I watched The Savages, I was in a strange mood. It had been a long, confusing week. Under the specter of our country’s economic collapse, I suffered my own crisis of confidence. My children have been in kindergarten for one month and they are flourishing. For three weeks I reveled in their success and in my new found freedom. Then, I began to flounder. After spending five and a half years preparing them to step successfully into the world without my guidance I find myself overwhelmed at any hint they might be struggling. They take bumps in the road in stride, but I get thrown off balance. I am cranky and upset. I overreact to small things. I am tired, my face is breaking out, and the other day, I cried on the street. This behavior goes against everything I know to be true about myself. I believe so fiercely in their independence and yet, I seem remarkably unprepared to handle it. Allowing them to try new things, to experience life without me, to succeed and fail on their own terms has turned me into an emotional wreck and this infuriates me.

So it was in that defeated state, I turned to The Savages. I figured I had nothing to lose because although I’m shocked at my inability to deal with a new stage in the life of my children, at least I know I am not good at handling the care of my ill father in his old age. I can’t seem to catch up with the changes he’s going through. I want to be with the person he is now but I often find myself acting like a teenager, responding to a man I knew twenty-five years ago. I can be unkind and short-tempered when I visit when I mean to be patient and helpful. I’m often confused by his behavior. Is he acting this way because he’s sick or because he’s old or is it just his personality? And which do I want the answer to be? Then comes the worst of the questions, the one raised by the mere act of having to visit him at all: How can I let my father be institutionalized? Why aren’t I taking care of him myself? It is hard to admit to the selfishness that is at the base of that answer. I am not taking care of him because it means changing the very things I value most in my life - my marriage and my home. I’d have to leave Brooklyn, move to the suburbs and would have a fourth person’s feelings and needs to consider in every decision I made every day. I am afraid to add my father to the equation of marriage, motherhood and career because I am unsure of the result.

I thought I might recognize myself in what the Savages are going through, but I didn’t. When the movie was over I wanted it returned immediately. I had an irrational fear that its cold, sadness might somehow infect our house. But after a while I began to feel sort of grateful. The movie had the unexpected effect of assuaging some of my guilt. The needs of my children and father might require more strength and humility than I currently possess, but at least I am engaged in a meaningful way with the people I care most about. All week I have been miserable because it seems to me that my emotions have run roughshod over my intellect. Now I have more respect for the ability to feel deeply. What a deadening of the soul the Savage children must have suffered from being abandoned. They can touch their father, kiss their father, provide for his physical care, but they can’t interact with him. I may be off kilter right now, but I at least I am alive. On one end of the spectrum there is a closeness so suffocating it clouds your reason, on the other there is a detachment so profound that even death can’t shake you awake, somewhere in the middle is a happy family.