Well, it is to be expected. With Little Miss Sunshine bagging a few Oscars, we could count the seconds before similarly disappointing films would hit the cinemas. The Savages is due out in the US in September, and is billed as a “serious comedy”. From the outset, the film appeared good. But that’s mostly due to Laura Linney, who was excellent in The Squid and the Whale, and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who, despite the film’s fatal flaws, deserved his Oscar for his portrayal of Capote.This is his first proper outing since then, excluding his miscast role in Mission Impossible 3.

The films looks like a cross between The Squid and the Whale and Little Miss Sunshine.  It’s the typical dysfunctional family, with a quirky and mad father, coming together in bouts of hilarity and poignancy. Or so the film’s makers wish. The difference between this and the two films above is that at least they were funny. From the trailer, the jokes in this film fall flat. Writer/director tries Tamara Jenkins her hand at the funny-because-it’s-true game, a type of film-making that’s light, nice, and safe, and rarely memorable. Take, for example, the final scene in the trailer, with the dysfunctional brother and sister helping themselves to biscuits during a meeting on dementia. It’s not awkward enough, it’s not clever enough, it’s just dull. And the trailer has little else, besides two accomplished actors, to make it rise above this era of formulaic U.S. independent cinema.
And on another note, what is it with trailers and music? There’s dozens of new albums with new music released every day, yet trailers use the same old scores and songs over and over. This trailer used an instrumental version of Spoon’s ‘The Way We Get By’, as featured in the opening minutes of Stranger than Fiction. Perhaps the marketing-obsessed decision makers want to cash in onthat film’s success. But really, do they have about 3 CDs to choose from? Cinema is supposed to be creative, so can’t they think of something else besides the theme from Requiem for a Dream?

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