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January 19, 2007
S07 reviews: The Savages
Note-perfect, Tamara Jenkins' The Savages puts an awful lot of American moviemaking to shame. Witty about neurosis and unblinking about mortality, her long-in-coming second feature is an unlikely fusion of the comedic precision of Annie Hall and the melancholy humanism The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, and I mean that in the most admiring and positive fashion. Line for line, The Savages has some of the most formidable comic dialogue I've been fortunate enough to hear in ages, and the screenplay is lovingly structured. I'll have more in a bit, but here's a sampling of Jenkins' ear for dialogue: "We're not in therapy right now, we're in real life"; "I'm not leaving you alone, I'm hanging up"; and "It's back to Krakow for Kasia. Your brother won't marry me, but when I make him eggs, he cries." [Like many other behavioral niceties one could cite, Cara Seymour's limpid yet freighted delivery of that line is dead-on lovely.] A quick free-range free-association: The surreal, heartfelt final shot, in its own strange way, evokes the "We need the eggs" scene that closes Annie Hall.
Posted by Ray Pride at January 19, 2007 04:36 PM
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