The Savages

Special, delightful, gentle, literate, profoundly funny. If you think The Savages is anything less than a cosmic spiritual gift, I don't know what to tell you. The sustained shot of Philip Seymour Hoffman stoned on Percocet while driving his car listening to Brecht and Weill is more than enough smart hysteria to keep you smiling through forty more minutes of death and dementia and disabled dogs.

As a matter of fact, the entire Brecht subplot is achingly queer and jolly, and absurd. Ever so slightly exposed in its stitchings you catch the sad, ludicrous stuff of real life, real failure, and real family affection. By the end of the movie you love these characters in the same compulsive, reluctant way you do your own flawed family. These bothersome people make us feel at home amid the floating, ephemeral objects of experience, and however much they vex us, they are a part of us, and we can no more live without them contentedly and completely as we can run with no legs or pulse with no heart to beat our blood about us.

Fiction turning into family? That's a welcome miracle.