Ah, the holidays are upon us again. It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year. Families reunite, lights are strung everywhere, compensatory gifts are exchanged, and massive meals are ingested. What better time to check out a few movies about rancid family dynamics at the multiplex?  If you’re in the market for a little misogynist bile about mothers and sisters, check out Margot at the Wedding (because the only thing more edifying than real Bergman is ersatz Bergman).  If your tastes run more towards fathers and sons, you have—naturally—more options. Coincidentally, they both happen to star Philip Seymour Hoffman, who seems to have cornered the market this year on dysfunctional adult son roles. All the better for us. Now, we here at Guy Movies realize that Tamara Jenkins’s exceptional black comedy The Savages isn’t exactly a guy movie per se, but if you want to see Hoffman embodying diametrically opposed reactions to bad fathering, it makes a sharp double bill with Sidney Lumet’s excellent crime tragedy Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. It also, incidentally, gives a nice, smart lesson in how to portray an equally dysfunctional and prickly daughter/sister without turning her into a monster. Bonus.

But first, the Devil. Lumet’s justly praised Return to 1970s Form has been kicking around the theaters since October, which counts as an eternity these days for a small, indie-flavored film. Could it be that a tale about a son’s lethally disastrous attempt to prove his manly bona fides as a partial fuck-you to his father might be striking a nerve with audiences for reasons that have nothing to do with its agile story-telling and incisive acting? Nah. Anyway, Lumet and writer Kelly Masterson’s time-jumping, perspective-shifting narrative steadily and inexorably adds layer upon psychological layer to a generic set-up about a heist gone wrong. Like Quentin Tarantino’s contemporary ur-text Reservoir Dogs, it becomes a study in the calamitous results of masculine posturing. Unlike Reservoir Dogs, it locates that drama firmly within the family. I mean, hey, isn’t that where it all begins? The prelude showing Hoffman’s venal first-born Andy screwing Marisa Tomei’s perpetually topless trophy wife Gina doggy-style (no, it is not pretty) as he admires himself in the mirror is both a red herring and a key indication of character. What ails Andy doesn’t necessarily stem from his marriage. Then again, that marriage is merely one of many (failed) ways for Andy to be the kind of man his tough, self-made father Charles might appreciate.  He may not be the beautiful coddled offspring like his brother Hank and afterthought, I-can’t-remember-her-name sister, but he sure can marry and nail a beautiful woman. When he’s not rendered impotent by his drug habit, that is.

The role of the father Charles in this fiasco is slow to emerge. For a while, it seems that Andy’s main target of repressed, barely conscious rage is that “baby” brother Hank. Who wouldn’t want to smack that squirrelly smile off Ethan Hawke’s face? This guy is an overt fuck-up who has probably coasted on his puppy dog eyes for years. Doughy Andy doesn’t have that luxury. He’s had to work hard to get to that shiny private office and hot wife. Andy, however, is a covert fuck-up, with that aforementioned heroin habit and the looming discovery of his corporate embezzlement. He’s not about to take responsibility for himself, either (like brother, like brother). Thus, the plan to rob their parents’ suburban jewelry store. Now, you’d think a self-styled cool customer like Andy would not assign the incompetent Hank the task of performing the robbery. He obviously knows his brother is a weak link. As they face each other across Andy’s desk, Hoffman is a study in bloodless manipulation, while Hawke is an array of twitches, shakes, sobs, and all-purpose sniveling. Then again, Andy obviously knows his brother is a weak link. If it all goes to hell, at least he can have the satisfaction of watching his brother finally take the fall. When Andy eventually does aim a gun at Hank, it’s for a lot more reasons than Hank’s affair with Gina. Cain, Abel: you know the deal. Ah, the bond of siblings.

When Charles first enters the picture, Albert Finney’s scenery noshing as the paternal unit feels like a little too much. As the story unfolds, however, it starts to make more sense because this is a man who looms very, very large in his eldest son’s deeply screwed up inner life. Andy’s low opinion of his brother pales in comparison to his hatred for Charles. As Andy observes when the anguish at long last seeps out, one apology does not make up for a lifetime of crap. Andy loathes his father for the expected Oedipal and non-Oedipal reasons (hard-ass; ostracism from alleged beautiful circle of family love), yet his soul-killing reach for upward mobility is what his father has programmed him to do. Andy’s contempt for weakness echoes Charles’s. Andy’s icy rage and preference for punishing everyone else around him rather than acknowledging his own part in the destruction also echo Charles. He is truly his father’s son. And it’s possible, despite every awful thing he’s done, to have a touch of sympathy for Andy because of that heritage.

It’s a bit easier to feel for The Savages’ Jon and Wendy Savage. They’ve chosen to respond to their paternal ills with intellectualism and a mordant sense of humor. Granted, those don’t solve their problems, but as far as defenses go, I’d have to say they beat drug addiction and armed robbery any day. Again playing the older brother, Hoffman this time is a man who has gone into retreat. He lives in Buffalo, for pity’s sake. Instead of coldly angry and calculating, he’s someone who has to be pushed into dealing with difficult situations, and who can only emotionally engage with his soon-to-be-gone Polish girlfriend when she makes him eggs. Whether by accident or design, he’s opted for a professional path bound to disappoint any father who’d like to brag that the son he essentially abandoned is a doctor: he’s a Doctor of Philosophy who specializes in Bertolt Brecht. Philip Bosco’s Lenny rewards Jon by gruffly barking that he’s not a “real” doctor. Trust me, that’s not what a Ph.D. wants to hear. Jon has dealt with abusive father Lenny’s structuring absence in his life by becoming an expert observer of dramatic distance.  Sure, that may sound like a mental state akin to heroin addiction, but at least he gets paid for it. He’s not in a desperate state like Andy, yet he’s definitely not thrilled to have to deal with the father who has done him so much wrong in the past. He does have one distinct advantage, though: a sibling who has suffered that parental dysfunction equally.  Younger sister Wendy isn’t another enemy—she’s a fellow traveler.

Hoffman’s Jon and Laura Linney’s tightly wound Wendy spar and crack up together with a familiarity that comes across as humane and deeply felt. Wendy is a more aggressive piece of work than her recessive brother, and correspondingly, she chooses to engage more directly with her familial trauma by turning it into a play. Her life is also more obviously broken, what with her desultory affair with a married neighbor, her petty theft of office supplies at temp jobs, and her self-aggrandizing lies.  Her brother calls her on one whopper, and a single shot from the argument that ensues perfectly encapsulates how Lenny has created this mess. As Jon and Wendy go at it in the car, the literally and emotionally deaf Lenny turns down his hearing aid, pulls up his hood, closes his eyes, and leans against the window.  He doesn’t care that his children are verbally shredding each other. He doesn’t care enough about them to even know what the argument is about. He just wants to get back to his bed. No wonder Wendy acts out the way she does—and no wonder Jon tries to adopt modernist distance as a way of life. Both stances imply great pain as well as survivalist wit, even as brother and sister tend to argue around the grief instead of show it.

Jon and Wendy never get a chance to tell their father what they truly think of him and what he’s done to them. Then again, Jon can remove his mentally deteriorating father from his bright, sunny Arizona retiree life (because he has to) and stick him in a dingy nursing home close to his own house. Moving from Arizona to Buffalo in the dead of winter does have a certain vengeful zing, even as Jon presents it as the only practical solution to the dubious Wendy. Nevertheless, their reconciliation as siblings who can support each other instead of rip each other has to do as their catharsis. Andy, on the other hand, does get his moment to tell his father how he really feels. That doesn’t save him, though—he doesn’t have the alternative family ties to help. He’s still doomed because he, like Jon, has a father who’d rather lash out at his offspring than face his own guilt. The best way the offspring can survive is to become a united front instead of kill each other. That’s actually a warm and fuzzy message. So what might a parent glean from these trips to the familial dark side during this joyous season? Be good to your children, people. Otherwise they may try to rip you off, or, even worse, stick you in a nursing home in Buffalo.



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