The Savages (Tamara Jenkins, 2007)

Philip Seymour Hoffman, Laura Linney, and Philip Bosco in The Savages

Cast: Laura Linney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Philip Bosco, Peter Friedman, David Zayas, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Cara Seymour, Tonye Patano, Guy Boyd, Debra Monk, Rosemary Murphy, Margo Martindale. Screenplay: Tamara Jenkins. Cinematography: W. Mott Hupfel III. Production design: Jane Ann Stewart. Film editing: Brian A. Kates. Music: Stephen Trask. 

The Savages are a dysfunctional family who live disjointed lives. The mother abandoned them at some point in their childhood, and Wendy (Laura Linney) and Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman), well into middle age, are both unmarried. Wendy is having an affair with a married man and Jon is in a relationship with a woman who is about to return to Poland because her visa has expired. Their father, Lenny (Philip Bosco), lives in Sun City, Ariz., with a woman he hasn't married, and when she dies he has already begun to sink into dementia. He has also signed an agreement that he has no stake in the legacy of the woman he lives with.This means that Wendy and Jon, who live in New York -- she in New York City, he in Buffalo -- have to drop everything and go tend to a parent from whom they are estranged. (He is said to have been abusive, although we're given no specifics.) Wendy is just a bit flaky: She's an aspiring playwright who supports herself by working as an office temp. Jon is just a bit withdrawn: He's a professor of English whose specialty is drama, particularly Bertolt Brecht. When Wendy comes up with impractical ideas about how to deal with their father, Jon tends to retreat into his shell. As for Lenny, he's just lucid enough to be cantankerous, especially at inconvenient moments. Such a story needs skilled actors to bring it off, and it gets them. There's just enough comedy in Tamara Jenkins's screenplay to keep the film from being a downer, and Linney, Hoffman, and Bosco know precisely how to balance the elements of pain and humor in their stories. Even though the predicament faced by the Savages is heightened by distance and alienation, the basics of the narrative are familiar to almost everyone who has aging parents, which makes The Savages something of a fable for our times. 

Nocturnal Animals (Tom Ford, 2016)

Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Shannon in Nocturnal Animals

Amy Adams in Nocturnal Animals

Susan Morrow: Amy Adams
Edward Sheffield / Tony Hastings: Jake Gyllenhaal
Bobby Andes: Michael Shannon
Ray Marcus: Aaron Taylor-Johnson
Laura Hastings: Isla Fisher
India Hastings: Ellie Bamber
Hutton Morrow: Armie Hammer
Lou: Karl Glusman
Turk: Robert Aramayo
Anne Sutton: Laura Linney
Samantha Morrow: India Menuez

Director: Tom Ford
Screenplay: Tom Ford
Based on a novel by Austin Wright
Cinematography: Seamus McGarvey
Production design: Shane Valentino
Film editing: Joan Sobel
Music: Abel Korzeniowski

Jake Gyllenhaal and Amy Adams are two of our best actors, but even they can't do what writer-director Tom Ford calls on them for in Nocturnal Animals: pull the two halves of his movie into coherence. Part of the film is a savage satire on the art world's high end and its wealthy patrons. The other part is a story of sexual violence and revenge. Adams's Susan Morrow exists in the first part as a wealthy gallery owner in Los Angeles with a husband who is cheating on her. One day she receives a manuscript from her ex-husband, Edward Sheffield. It provides the second story, about Tony Hastings, who is waylaid by vicious young thugs while driving across West Texas by night. His wife, Laura, and his teenage daughter, India, are in the car with him, but Tony, who survives by hiding from the men, is unable to save Laura and India from being raped and murdered. With the help of Bobby Andes, a detective who is dying of lung cancer, he gets his revenge but, as they say, at a cost. As Susan reads the manuscript, she envisions Tony as Edward, whom she had betrayed by leaving him and aborting their child, then marrying the wealthy Hutton Morrow, with whom she has a now-grown daughter, Samantha. The story so disturbs Susan that she wonders why Edward chose to send it to her after so many years -- is this tale of revenge itself  a kind of threat? As well-done as the Tony Hastings story is, with strong performances by not only Gyllenhaal but also Michael Shannon as Andes and Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the vicious Ray Marcus, it never comes into the same focus as the "real" story of Susan and the rather decadent art world in which she moves. That said, the best scene in the film may be the one in which Susan has lunch with her mother, a big-haired Texas grande dame played with finesse by Laura Linney. Ford has a way of tossing in secondary characters whose backstories sound potentially more interesting than the ones in the foreground. Nocturnal Animals is a disappointment, but only because it feels like it skims the surface of what it has to tell us.