From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment.

You can also hear the show at KCRW.com.

My guest, writer-director Tamara Jenkins, has a great way of blending comedy and drama,

so neither of them overwhelms the other.

She started that with her first film back in the 20th century, Slums of Beverly Hills.

She's chosen to revisit the world of filmmaking with a new film starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Savage's.

First of all, thanks for doing this.

Thank you.

First of all, I'll tell your audience a little bit what the movie's about. It's about a brother and sister,

played by Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman, their adult siblings. They have an

strange relationship with their father, and suddenly, because of a series of events, this father,

they become responsible for this, for this father, and he's an elderly, ailing person. And essentially

they... And their whole lives have been spent, sort of running away from their father, escaping their father, escaping that orbit.

Yes. And suddenly they're in a position of having to care for this guy that never cared for them, take care of him. And then there's all this sort of practical aspects to it.

You know, they put him in a nursing home, essentially, which on the surface doesn't sound like

there's anything funny in it at all. And yet there is. I know that, yeah, because the architecture of

it, if you just described the plot to somebody, two middle-aged siblings, dementia,

an old man, a nursing home. That does not sound like the ingredients of anything that would

ever be funny. I remember when the film played at Sundance, people were so shocked that somebody

would make a movie that sort of blends both these things together. Was that shocking to you

that people were so taken aback by me? Yeah, it's been interesting that kind of, that that question comes up at every Q&A, for instance, after a screening.

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