Tamara Jenkins begins The Savages with a surreal head-scratcher—a geriatric chorus line emerging from green hedges to the 1894 refrain "I Don't Want to Play in Your Yard," but the silliness soon melts into dry humor with a hearty dose of pathos delivered expertly by Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney.

As frustrating as dementia can be for the elderly, consider how difficult this becomes for the children, watching their parent deteriorate right in front of them. That's the immediate premise of The Savages, which reconnects middle-aged siblings Jon (Hoffman) and Wendy (Linney) Savage. Disappearing many years from their lives for years, their father Leonard (Philip Bosco) lives with his girlfriend Doris in idyllic Sun City, Arizona (a retirement community where residents frequently abandon their cars to commute via golf carts). But Doris abruptly drops dead, and Lenny is rendered homeless and unceremoniously strapped to a hospital bed. With his rapidly fading mental capacity, Lenny doesn't fully understand his plight.

To the rescue come drama professor Jon and struggling playwright Wendy, who fly to the sun drenched winter paradise from Buffalo and New York City respectively. Dysfunctionally reared with abuse and neglect, the siblings must now decide how to best care for their dad, given their limited resources. Jon locates an affordable nursing home solution in Buffalo that serves as a vehicle to contrast brother and sister, and this develops into the main crux of the drama. More than anything, the intelligently crafted script serves as a great acting vehicle for Hofmann and Linney to show their wares and demonstrate character nuances that plot driven movies would never allow.

Although raised in the same circumstances, Jon and Wendy are polar opposites in both appearance and in how they handle situations. Overweight and disheveled Jon conceals his emotions while lithe Wendy wears them on her sleeve. Pragmatic Jon hones in on solutions with relative detachment, so he sees the nearby nursing home as perfectly adequate—after all, Lenny remains essentially clueless about where the hell he is. Wendy, on the other hand, abhors the conditions and tries to find a cheerier location before giving in to her brother's infallible logic.

Jon is actually dealing with a plethora of issues that Wendy learns about gradually through the process of watching over their dad during his final days. Under stress to publish a book on Brecht, he's also dealing with separating from his Polish girlfriend since her visa is expiring. Marriage could alleviate the problem, but Jon can't act that spontaneously with the history of family dysfunction. Relationships have never been easy for either of the siblings, yet Jon has been able to function adequately in the world. In crisis mode, he's the one who takes care of business and gets things done, and his sensitive side is gradually revealed—glimpses of intense late night phone calls with his girlfriend, the way he takes care of his sister, and even a few tears over fried eggs.

Wendy is the one who seems completely unfulfilled. Unmarried, she continues to have an affair with a relatively happily married man despite its banality (note her forlorn gaze towards the dog while her neighbor makes love to her). She's worked only temp jobs while submitting rejected scripts—her only lucrative writing being for a FEMA grant (hardly the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship drama award desired). But she makes strides by the end of the narrative.

Both characters offer hope for the many nameless dysfunctional family participants among us without a simplistic Hollywood ending. Jenkins scripts and directs a warm, heartfelt character study with tons of great little moments that the two lead actors deliver flawlessly. As long as you don't expect easy answers to the problems of dementia and dying parents or a definitive way to overcome childhood baggage, you'll be rewarded by a film that refuses to insult your intelligence.