first look: the savages

"The Savages"
dir., Tamara Jenkins
2007

Does anyone remember "The Slums of Beverly Hills"? It was a smart, funny coming-of-age movie from 1998 starring a then promising young actress named Natasha Lyonne. I only saw it once but I do remember the film being an honest, amusing, and uncomfortable take on family and what that means to a teenager trying to discover their identity. I'm not sure why it has taken the film's writer and director, Tamara Jenkins, almost a decade to make another film, but her latest film looks like an appropriate and mature follow-up for a filmmaker who is not interested in overly stylizing or abstracting the unease and ever-shifting relationships in a family. It doesn't hurt that it stars two incredibly gifted actors in turns that look like nothing I've seen out of them before. Count me in.