John and Wendy Savage are siblings, both “theater people”, who have survived parental abandonment and abuse to reach adulthood intact. That is, if you consider an angsty pill-popping playwright with a married boyfriend or an emotionally withdrawn workaholic professor to be well adjusted.

Wendy (Laura Linney), a Manhattanite, often finds truth inconvenient. To pay the bills while working on her self-proclaimed “subversive, semi-autobiographical play”, she temps and writes grant applications. John (Philip Seymour Hoffman) splits his time between teaching dramatic theory at a college in Buffalo and writing a book on German playwright Bertolt Brecht. His Polish girlfriend is leaving the country with her expired visa, and he thinks he is dealing with her departure. He’s just fine.

When their long-lost father begins to exhibit signs of dementia, writing obscenities on the walls with his own excrement, Wendy and John have no choice but to fetch him and admit him to a nursing home near John’s home in snowy upstate New York. Waiting out the holidays in Buffalo, they don’t get closer to understanding their father, but they awkwardly begin to understand themselves.

In The Savages (rated R for some sexuality and language), writer/director Tamara Jenkins has deftly turned a traditionally tear-jerking plot— caring for a sick, elderly parent—into the undercurrent of a story about adults learning to grow up. Instead of succumbing to readily available maudlin moments, The Savages lets us laugh at the sheer, sad ridiculousness of the situation.

Hoffman and Linney are two of today’s greatest actors, and seeing them work together is pure pleasure. They bicker and commiserate with uncanny chemistry. Their characters work as foils to each other—a drama queen and a hyper-rational academic—and as they inch toward maturity, they reflect our own shortcomings.