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Philip Bosco plays the father figure around which the action stirs: Found smearing his own excrement on the bathroom walls of his Arizona residence, he's eventually placed into the hands of his distant -- both geographically and emotionally -- offspring, Jon and Wendy Savage (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney). Jon's a college professor in Buffalo, while Wendy's an aspiring writer in New York City; neither one has the time nor the inclination to take care of the old man -- more so since by all accounts he made their childhoods miserable -- but they do their best to find him suitable lodging in an "assisted living" facility. But Wendy's definition of suitable is different than Jon's, and the siblings end up squabbling about his living arrangements, a discussion that opens up a can of worms regarding their relationships not only with their father but with each other.
Jenkins' screenplay is sometimes too smug for its own good -- her reverence for the elderly seems so sincere in many of the film's best passages that it's startling when she occasionally uses these folks for cheap comic effect -- but overall, The Savages is a keenly observed study offering believably bruised people making the best out of their rickety lives. As for the two leads, they're equally superb. Linney turns every one of Wendy's foibles and insecurities into a mountain that the character must scale before she can come to acceptance with herself, and the actress keeps us firmly in her corner. As for Hoffman, this is his third great performance of 2007 -- he's also aces in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead and Charlie Wilson's War -- and thanks largely to a smashing sequence in which he describes the brutal realities of growing old, it's also his best.
The Savages sports a sharp-edged tone that might put some viewers off, but in Hoffman and Linney, it provides us with two of the premier performances of last year. That's a tough act to top.
AROUND THIS TIME last year, moviegoers were suffering through Because I Said So, a Diane Keaton vehicle so horrific that it barely got beat out by License to Wed for the top spot on my year-end 10 Worst list. Luckily, Keaton's new film, Mad Money, is much better, simply by virtue of the fact that I wasn't tempted to cram a gun muzzle into my mouth this time around.
That's not to say it couldn't have been better. Callie Khouri won a well-deserved Oscar for penning Thelma & Louise, and it would have been interesting to see what additional shadings she could have lent to the situations on display here. But for Mad Money, she only serves as director, leaving the writing assignment in the hands of Glenn Gers. The Anthony Hopkins-Ryan Gosling thriller Fracture (which Gers wrote) was a pleasant surprise last year, and Gers fares best in this latest picture when he focuses on the intricacies of the heist that our leading ladies intend to pull off. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Keaton stars as Bridget, an upper-middle-class wife reeling from that fact that her husband (Ted Danson, very good in his best role in ages) has lost his job and they're now in danger of losing their home. As a temporary solution, she takes a job as a janitor at the Federal Reserve Bank, where she soon devises an elaborate scheme to steal the worn-out bills marked for destruction. She enlists the aid of two co-workers, sensible single mom Nina (Queen Latifah) and vivacious party girl Jackie (Katie Holmes), and the trio set about pulling off the most unlikely of heists.
A remake of a 2001 British TV-movie called Hot Money (never shown in this country), Mad Money is a generally entertaining picture, even if it dabbles in implausibilities and often fails to get a firm grasp on its characters (for example, several scenes attempt to paint Holmes' Jackie as an utter dingbat when she clearly isn't). Are there better ways for film fans to spend their own money than using it on Mad Money? Certainly. But there are also worse ways. They could be renting Because I Said So.
27 DRESSES is the filmic equivalent of a baby: cute, pampered, craving attention, and somewhat smelly thanks to all the formula passing through it.
A rom-com that dutifully follows down the genre's preordained path rather than ever taking off on its own, this casts Knocked Up's Katherine Heigl as Jane, a perpetual bridesmaid who (as the title hints) has attended 27 weddings in that capacity. Jane feels that it's payback time from the gods -- that she should land her own man, her own wedding and her own bridesmaids -- and she's long been pining over her boss George (Edward Burns).
