SAVAGE PATCH KIDS
A talk with Oscar-nominated ‘The Savages’ star Laura Linney
by Fred Topel
Ask any actor the generic questions of what attracted them to their latest project, and they’ll give some rehearsed answer about the script or the filmmakers. Laura Linney is aware of this, so was hesitant to give such a response about her latest film, The Savages. However, she has the credibility to back it up.
“You hear that over and over again but when a script is undeniably good, you pay attention,” she said. “It becomes clear to me there’s something to me that something’s going on when I read the script through for the first time and I start working on it before I finish reading it. Your actor brain just turns on. I can’t help it. All of a sudden, ideas start coming and you start hearing the rhythm of things. For a script to be that evolved that early is very rare. It’s happened a few times luckily for me. But it’s not typical.”
It may be rare in Hollywood for actors to read their own scripts at all. Most stars have teams of people “protecting” them from bad material. “One never knows what those agents are doing. I hope I see what comes in because I can read a script the way that they can’t. They’re not trained to. I am. Honestly, they’ll read something that they think is fantastic, I love my agents, but they also know me well enough that they don’t make decisions on my behalf ever. They know. They’ll see something and say it’s great and fantastic, and then I’ll read it and say, this isn’t actable. It’s a great idea. But it’s not actable. Or they’ll get something that they don’t have a hook into whatsoever, and I’ll think, this is fantastic. So I hope they don’t read things on my behalf and pass. That probably does happen in the reality of how this town works.”
Working as often as Linney does, one might think she is constantly reading. That is not the case. “They’re just not coming in all the time. They’re not there to read. When they come in, I read them. Everyone’s sort of idea that we have scripts coming in the window isn’t a reality. I read a script every once in a while and I’ve been very lucky because a lot of them that come my way have been pretty good.”
The Savages casts Linney as a sister arguing with her brother (Philip Seymour Hoffman) over the care of their father (Philip Bosco). Dad has not been a part of their lives, but now that he needs to be institutionalized for elderly care, Wendy Savage wants better for him.
“A lot of it was somewhat ego-driven. She wants daddy’s little girl to do the best for him so it will enhance the relationship that isn’t there. It’s a romanticized view. Of course, you want someone to be in the nicest place you can get them into.”
The siblings were not the closest of friends either, so dealing with each other for such a prolonged ordeal brought out deep rooted neuroses too. “That’s what so fun about looking at people and how they behave differently around different people, how you hang around a parent as opposed to your child or an old childhood friend or what you slip back into. I loved those moments where she would fight him like she was seven. With the intensity of an 11 year old, pushing him as far as she could. It was self-righteous. I mean, it was fun. It was really fun.”
The Savages also explores Wendy’s romantic relationships, one affair with a married man, and her pursuit of an orderly who is also involved. “She went after the wrong people. There are reasons for that. Jon and Wendy’s lives are so formed by whatever relationship they had with Phil [Bosco]’s character. Their childhood is so much with them and they’re in different stages of arrested development but while Phil [Hoffman]’s character is coming off that sense of abuse, she was just ignored. There was just neglect and you can see that in how they respond to the situation: the crisis of having to take care of their father. My character has this romanticized vision of what their relationship is and what has to be done. I’m going to decorate the room and there’s this sense of still desperately trying to have a relationship with [her dad] in a very sort of childish way. Phil’s character has stopped that long ago but both are going to be better people than their parent was. What do you do when you have to take care of a parent that didn’t love you? And how do you accept the fact this parent didn’t love you?”
Linney handled things a little differently when her loved ones needed care. “I remember when my grandfather went into a nursing home and we would go visit him there and then my grandmother went into the same nursing home much later. I helped move her in there and that was brutal. That is hard. She was 98 and she had lived alone until she was 98 years old. She got in there and she was the mayor. Fortunately, I know that she had a nice last few years there. She was cheery and happy and all that. There was that situation and then my stepfather when he died, there was a period of decline there that was hard to watch. The dementia can be so funny. It can be just hysterical. I remember my stepfather was in intensive care and he thought he was in Paris. It was fantastic. I was so happy that he thought it was in Paris. He was talking about it. Then he thought I had spots all over my face and he was trying to move the spots around. There was something about it that made me feel better that he was in some sort of place that was not painful. It wasn’t in my reality but at least it was in a reality in which he wasn’t in pain. That made me happy.”
Right now, Linney is committed to working. There won’t be much of a family life for her as long as there are projects like The Savages to hold her attention. “It doesn’t exist when you’re working. This movie was sometimes 16-18 hours a day. There’s no other life.”
She may want to slow down soon, but she would not turn down another great role just for the sake of having time off. “That’s not always possible, given schedules and budgets. If it’s the kind of movie you want to do. But it would be nice, certainly.”
With a nomination for Best Actress just in, Oscar buzz is building, but Linney keeps things in perspective.
“It’s nice that people seem to think that it’s good. It’s nice that maybe the movie will have a bit of a life. When you put time into these films, you don’t know if anybody’s going to see them. With scripts that are good, you hope that they do have a life so that maybe other people will make movies that have scripts that are a little complicated and will push an audience a little bit. I’m happy for that reason. I don’t wake up in the morning and go, ’Please God!’ But it’s certainly nice.”
Fred Topel is a widely-published L.A.-based freelance writer who contributes regularly to EDGE Boston.