Feeling suicidal? DO NOT GO SEE THIS MOVIE! If you are, and you do, by the final credits, you'll be trying to stuff your underpants down your windpipe. I saw it a couple of days ago, and I'm still not sure life is worth living. This movie is less an exploration of modern adult life than a promo for Dr. Jack Kevorkian.

The story is about two miserable adult children (Laura Linney and Truman Capote-impersonator Phillip Seymour Hoffman) who are called upon to retrieve their asshole father, who they haven't seen in years, after the senile woman he's been shacking up with in the old person's limbo known as Sun City, Arizona drops dead in the lap of a Vietnamese nail polisher. Personally, if I had been one of the kids, I would have avoided the situation by heading out of town without leaving a forwarding address, but that's just me. Nevertheless, they take him, in the middle of winter, to Buffalo, where the son lives and works as a hack college professor expert in the works of Bertolt Brecht. Dad gets dumped into an odiferous nursing home/Medicaid mill, and the fun begins!

The estranged father is played by Philip Bosco, who turns in the kind of performance that makes knee-jerk critics rave: a generic, abusive, loud-mouthed, decrepit old fart, who is indistinguishable from hundreds of other old fart portrayals in hundreds of other over-rated movies. I'm surprised Bosco didn't get a supporting actor Oscar nomination.

There is more crying in this movie than in a highlight reel of Meryl Streep's greatest cinematic moments. The neurotic, self-pitying daughter, Wendy, weeps over the deteriorating old man, her married boyfriend's sick dog, a dying houseplant, etc. The goateed, fat slob son, Jon, cries a lot, too, especially when his fat Polish girlfriend cooks him eggs. Not surprisingly, the Polish sausage dumps him and escapes to Warsaw, which makes him cry more. The soundtrack to the movie contributes to the mood of despair, as it sounds like an old Windham Hill record played at the wrong speed. Note: although promoted as a dark comedy, every funny bit in the movie is in the trailer. The despair was so intense, I spent part of the movie with my eyes closed trying to figure out why Phillip Seymour Hoffman would want anyone to know that his middle name is "Seymour."

There was, however, one hilarious dark comedy moment in seeing "The Savages." I was late to the showing, so I snuck into a front row during the previews, in the dark. During the credits, when the houselights went up, I turned and saw that the majority of the people in the audience were nearly the same age as the dad in the movie--and they had just been confronted with what they had to look forward to. A decent person would have felt instant empathy for what they had unwittingly been hit with. Instead, I barked out a convulsive laugh before I caught myself. I guess that's just me.

--Oddball