This film is a powerful and largely unsentimental anthropology of geriatric middle-class Americans and their overwhelmed and oddly adolescent children (what Jon calls "the guilty demographic"). The "savages" of the title are a fascinating tribe. They are contrasted with the non-middle-class and often non-white people who are paid to care for the aging. In particular, a Nigerian male nurse who befriends Wendy is, rare in this film, neither deluded nor despairing.

From its opening sequence at Sun City (elderly cheerleaders in short skirts, golf carts and home help) to Lenny's quiet death in the nursing home, where he seems more comfortable and well-cared for (despite the bad smells) than his children believe, the film exposes the collusion of denial and guilt and the way both, paradoxically, diminish the dignity of the old. Wendy tries to move Larry to a "nicer" nursing home-one with a slicker ad campaign. Jon accuses her of selfishness, saying the "wellness" and the "landscaping" are there for her, not her father, and cannot conceal the reality, the "rotten stink" of death.

The film is also about storytelling as identity, our imagined lives as necessary fabrications. Performance, theater, and narrative inform Jon and Wendy's responses. Asked to go to Arizona to find their father, Jon says "we're not in a Sam Shepard play." He hears that Larry is dying while teaching a class on Brecht. After he gets the news, a students asks "What's the difference between plot and narrative?" And Wendy tells lies. She tells her lover she has suspected cervical cancer, tells her brother she won a Guggenheim. Niether is true. This makes us skeptical about the version of their childhood presented in her play. Jon neither confirms or denies the scene he watches, weeping, in rehearsal--where their father hits Jon as a boy, repeatedly, and Jon rises from the scene in a harness, like Peter Pan detached from normal growth--but it is clearly a story that has dominated their lives at a terrible cost, and their father's death, in their presence, is the only way that this particular story can be allowed, at last, to end.

The film's ending is guardedly optimistic. The nursing home is euphemistically called a "rehabilitation center." It does, perhaps, rehabilitate--re-fit for life, and also for death--by fostering the tough acknowledgement of mortality, something that Sun City denies to the end. (Doris, already almost catatonic, dies there in the middle of a manicure the beautician says is to make her "sexy.")

Wendy's lover tells her that he plans to euthanize his old labrador because her hips are weak and "rehabilitation is brutal." The film ends in a scene of Wendy running with the dog, who has been outfitted (brutally? ridiculously? happily?) with wheels.