(2007) Written and directed by Tamara Jenkins, this film presents a realistic view of two unprepared siblings having to deal with the decline and death of their estranged father. Wendy Savage (Laura Linney) is an unsuccessful playwright getting by with temp jobs in New York City when Nancy, the daughter of her father's girlfriend, calls to inform her of her father's writing on the bathroom wall with his own feces. In the middle of the night Wendy fanatically calls her older brother, Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a professor in Buffalo, who tries to defuse her alarm: "We are not in a Sam Shepard play."

Shortly afterward Doris Metzger, with whom Lenny Savage (Philip Bosco) has been living for the past 20 years in her Sun City, Arizona, house, dies during a manicure. Left without anywhere to live (Doris's property was willed to her daughter), Lenny, suffering from the onset of dementia, must rely upon his son and daughter for sustenance. Wendy - an emotional mess with a controlling personality - and Jon after flying to Arizona, return to New York with their father whom they place in the Valley View nursing home near to Jon's residence. "We're doing the right thing," Jon reassures Wendy, "taking better care of the old man than he ever did of us."

Attempting to obtain information from their father about the possibility of resuscitation and his remains, Wendy fumbles around the edges while Jon asks direct questions to which Lenny answers abruptly: "pull the plug" and "bury me." The brother and sister take their father for an interview at Greenhill Manor (the landscape of which Jon criticizes as masking the ghastliness of death while accusing Wendy of wanting to find an upper-mobility setting to assuage her feelings of guilt), at which he fails to gain entrance; they arrive late for a class on taking care of elderly parents where the recommended text is Eldercare for Dummies.

Most of the staff at Valley View are minorities, such as Lenny's kindly Nigerian-born room aide, Jimmy (Gbenga Akinnagbe), who asks Wendy: "Are you married?" She answers: "No, but my boyfriend is." Wendy, 38, is having an affair with Larry, a married man 14 years her senior, and trying to get her play, Wake Me When It's Over, about her childhood, published. Jimmy asks if he may read it and reassures her that her father isn't about to die because a person's toes curl under like those of the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz before they die.

Jon, 43, who is working on a book about German dramatist Bertolt Brecht, has just said farewell to his Polish girlfriend Kasia because she had to return to Poland. Jon invites Wendy to move in with him while they work on their writing and visit with their father. Struggling with insecurity, Wendy prevaricates to manipulate Larry and Jon, obtaining compliments from her brother by telling him she has received a Guggenheim fellowship, which he has failed to obtain for himself six times.

On an outing near Christmas in the presence of their father, Jon and Wendy get into a screaming argument of sibling rivalry. In class during instruction, Jon receives a call on his cell phone informing him of his father's imminent demise, immediately after which a female student asks him to explain the difference between plot and narrative. This narrative ends six months later with expedient trivialities tidying up loose ends.

Unlike the misfortunes visited upon many other families, the brother and sister were fortunate that their father didn't linger for months or years, wasting away both their fickle patience and paltry finances.

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Copyright © 2007 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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