Family angst? Now that’s something she can work with

In “Slums of Beverly Hills,” Tamara Jenkins’ 1998 debut film, a somewhat crummy dad buys his teen daughter her first bra. Nearly a decade later, in the director’s second feature film, “The Savages,” an adult daughter gets her pretty crummy dad his first diapers.

At 45, the director is 10 years older and her concerns have shifted from growing up to growing old, but she’s still engrossed by the drama of the flawed parent-child relationship and the dark comedy of familial misery.

In “The Savages,” the emotionally messy Wendy Savage (Laura Linney) and the emotionally reticent Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman) reconnect for the morose task of placing their father in a nursing home. Hauling a load of domestic baggage, the siblings grapple with caring for their estranged father, recently diagnosed with dementia -- and bicker.

When the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival (and then went to Toronto), Jenkins found that the topic resonated deeply with her audiences. She listened to an outpouring of elder-care stories during post-screening Q&As; and was encouraged to hear that people could relate -- and still could laugh too.

“Usually that aspect of life is so quarantined and private and almost taboo,” said Jenkins, whose father and grandmother suffered from dementia and finished their lives in nursing homes. Her father died when she was 25, long before any of her friends had to deal with a parent’s death or illness.

Some 5 million Americans care for an aging parent, and as the population ages, this figure is projected to double within the next 20 years, according to studies. While images of sporty seniors bound through Centrum Silver ads, for many elderly adults and their shell-shocked children, the golden years are no cup of tea.

Jenkins wanted to represent “this primitive, mad, savage thing” that happens when families face death and dying. “The Savages” was born of a scene Jenkins had written long ago about a sister calling her brother in the middle of the night to tell him that their father had written on the wall with his excrement. This primal, regressive image just came to Jenkins like a nightmare, a gothic scene that is both hugely disturbing and quite possible.

The brother and sister later became Hoffman’s Jon and Linney’s Wendy, who approach their father’s declining health in diametrically opposed ways. Jon is a brutal realist, while Wendy is a reactive emotionalist. “That was the chemical reaction that the movie was going to be about, the dynamic between these two people with very different techniques of survival.” Jenkins relates to both characters, “both sides of them exist inside of me.”

‘YOU ARE STUCK TOGETHER’

The film’s potency rests significantly on the actors’ raw performances. Of Hoffman and Linney, Jenkins said, “I really got the A team.” She said each has a radar for material and for choosing parts to sink their teeth into. “The chemistry was so important between these two characters -- the way it would be for a love story,” Jenkins said. “If that dynamic wasn’t there, we’d be DOA.”

The intense, conflicted relationship between family members is the material of choice for Jenkins. The familial discord on HBO’s “The Sopranos” also “in a weird way” fed her germinal thoughts about worst-case elder care; she was struck by Tony’s conflicted relationships with his mother and his Uncle Junior, and his responsibilities to a thankless parent.

Although the female leads in her films are both semi-autobiographical daughters and sisters, Jenkins chalks it up to a preoccupation with parents and children. “There is something about the hothouse nature of family that is very compelling -- it’s like a little petri dish of human behavior,” she said. “There’s something inherently dramatic about the situation of a family because you are stuck together.”