Laura Linney is nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress in this personal movie about a woman and her brother (Philip Seymour Hoffman) dealing with their estranged father’s dementia and declining physical health. Wendy Savage (Linney) is an aspiring but unproduced playwright in New York City who earns a living as a temp. She has a physical relationship with a married neighbor, but seems to be more emotionally involved with his golden retriever (and who can blame her?). Her brother Jon lives in Buffalo where he is a professor of depressing theater (i.e. Bertolt Brecht). When their father suddenly finds himself homeless and demented, they find themselves suddenly responsible for taking care of a man who never took care of them. Absent when they were in diapers, Wendy is confronted with her father in a diaper. Jon argues the pragmatic approach of a nursing home; Wendy is wracked by guilt. While her father’s life slips away, Wendy is stuck in neutral, never having really started her life. She works as a temp. She conceals her writing failures from her brother. She is engaged in a relationship that she knows has no long-term prospects. The movie is about her coming of age in middle age.