Fat City vs. The Savages

I watched Fat City (on an old videotape, I think it may be out of print on dvd) and The Savages back to back the past two nights. Fat City is one of my all time favorite movies (the book is pretty great, too). I'm going to go out on a limb and say it is the best boxing movie ever made (yes, even better than Raging Bull which looks like a pretentious arthouse movie in comparison--and I love Raging Bull). And, of course, it's much more than a boxing movie. Stacy Keach plays Billy Tully, a washed up boxer who tries to make a comeback after being inspired by a young amateur named Ernie (a very young Jeff Bridges). Neither one of them has a whole lot going on in their lives in Stockton, California, which looks like it never made it out of the Great Depression. Along the way Tully meets up with Oma (Susan Tyrrell in the best performance of a drunk ever) and things deteriorate quickly. I won't give away any more plot details, but don't expect a Rocky-like ending. Every scene in Fat City feels natural; there's not a false note in the movie. The same cannot be said for The Savages. About halfway through I got the sense that the writer had lost confidence in her ability to handle such a serious subject (adult children dealing with a parent with a terminal illness). Unlike Fat City, it shies away from grim reality by piling on one quirky, unrealistic scene after another (the tennis scene, the neckbrace scene, the fling with the nursing home orderly scene, etc.). Because the characters are so unrealistic (particularly Laura Linney's character), there was no emotional attachment to them at all which was strange considering the heavy subject matter. It was the complete opposite of Fat City where you felt every cutting remark as if it were a punch to the gut. Fat City over The Savages in a knockout.