I ALMOST FELL ASLEEP THE FIRST TEN MINUTES
"How about we go to the movies?" - asked my wife. "Your call" - I answered. "How about The Savages?" With only one association - I hear it got good reviews - I quickly agreed.
I continued feeling positive about our choice until about 10 minutes into the film. By then it was obvious that the story line was not exactly what I would refer to as escapist, or fun, or even just compelling. Indeed I was finding it dreary, depressing, colorless.
I knew that the Savages were a family and that the movie was a realistic story about the family members. I also had heard that the time period was in the fifties. The first few scenes showing the contrast between the surface glitz of subburban living versus the depressing realities of nursing homes for the elderly who have only a relatively short time to live called up memories of the savage film: Blue Velvet.
Oh I get it I said to myself. This is another one of those lets get to the bitter realities under the surface pseudo nicities. Did I really want to stay and watch a dysfunctional delayed adoescent brother and sister in their 40s - one a professor of drama writing a paper on Brecht - and his sister - a frustrated playwrite having an affair with a nice enough married man who was never going to leave his wife. Both of whom were living only a few steps up from what you would expect the living conditions would be for college Juniors.
And to think they were going to assume responsibility for taking care of their cranky, bitter, childlike father who was more of a pain than a pleasure.... this was to be my Saturday night entertainment? It was all I could do not to go from nodding to descend into a full fledged sleep.
Then there was a notable shift. The sister - I forget her name - is remarkably appealing. Fresh, perky, vulnerable, highly intelligent, but with obvious low self esteem. Her brother - in his own way - somewhat similar only a bit more jaded and bordering on cynicism.
They come together because of their father and interact in ways which I have rarely seen dramatized in movies. They have an intense sibling rivalry but the obvious love they have for one another far outweighs the hate and the raw competition.
As the movie unfolds they talk to each other with uncompromising real authentic talk. They 'savage' each other. But their talk is eventually transformative. They actually demonstrate how the truth can set them free.
The name savage then both refers to the meaning of dishing out and receiving the bitter - savage truth of their naked realities. Yet at the same time - the obvious love they have for one another suggests another more profound meaning of the concept of savage - as primitive, natural, authentic.
So what began with me nodding off in obvious denial and a certain measure of idenitification with the characters and the story and the plot progressively shifted into a total immersion into the truly uplifting experience I was enjoying.
The story reinforces the obvious but often denied fact that all of us are initially caught and deeply affected by the particualr time/space continuum we happen to have been born into. We don't consciously pick our parents, the location of our birth, the era into which we start our own personal histories as individuals living our unique lives.
We all have lows and at times may feel we have hit bottom when we experience our own problems as impossible to resolve. It is easy at those points to wave a white flag, opt out, go back to bed and pull the covers over our heads wailing why me and drowning in a vat of psychological negativity and self pity. The other attitude to such qunitessential stuckness is to summon up the where with all to fight the good fight - to damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead with the attitude of bring em on.
The story points out that bad things can and often do happen to genuinely nice human beings.
The issue is not the deck of cards one is dealt but whether one chooses to play the best one can with the deck they have whether the hand is a good one or not.
The movie also reinforces the notion that as Spinoza days: Anything worth attainining is as difficult as it is rare."
By the end of the movie felt fresh, alive, and happy to continue my own struggle with struggle supported by the knoweldge that I am truly not alone in my quest for meaningful connections.
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