The Savages (film) - Plot

Plot

After drifting apart emotionally over the years, two single siblings — Wendy (Linney) and Jon (Hoffman) — band together to care for their estranged, elderly father, Lenny (Philip Bosco), who is rapidly slipping into dementia. Wendy and Jon first travel to Sun City, Arizona, to attend the funeral of their father's girlfriend of 20 years. When they arrive, they are told that their father signed a non-marriage agreement and will not have rights to any of her property. They then move him to a nursing home in Buffalo, New York, where Jon is a theater professor working on a book about Bertolt Brecht. Wendy, who is an aspiring, but unsuccessful, playwright, moves from New York City to help establish their father in Buffalo.

Neither is close with Lenny, who is said to have been a difficult man to live with. (It is implied that he was a physically and emotionally abusive father when Jon and Wendy were growing up and they cut him out of their lives.) Their dysfunctional family life appears to have left Wendy and Jon emotionally crippled and unable to sustain a relationship. She is sleeping with an unattainable married man 13 years her senior and he cannot commit to a Polish woman who must return to Kraków after her visa expires.

Their visits to the nursing home and their father's eventual death allow them to reevaluate their lives and to grow emotionally. In the end, Wendy is seen working on the production of her play about their terrible childhood and Jon is leaving for a conference in Poland where it is suggested he may reconnect with the woman he had let go.