SAVAGE GRACE
Directed by Tom Kalin
Written by Howard A. Rodman
Starring Julianne Moore, Stephen Dillane and Eddie Redmayne
Classification: 18A
***
Savage Grace is not one of those movies that is fun for the whole family. A drama disturbing enough to have caused walkouts at various film festivals where it has been shown since its debut at Cannes in 2007, the film walks the fine line between exploitation and empathy to cast a chilly, memorable spell.
Based on Natalie Robins's and Steven M.L. Aronson's 1985 epic oral history, Savage Grace: The True Story of Fatal Relations in a Rich and Famous American Family, the film chronicles events leading up to the 1972 murder of socialite Barbara Baekeland (Julianne Moore), who was stabbed to death by her 25-year-old son, Antony (Eddie Redmayne).
Tom Kalin (he made the 1992 movie Swoon, about 1920s thrill killers Leopold and Loeb) starts his story in 1946, shortly after the birth of Antony (Tony) Baekeland. He was the heir to a fortune built on Bakelite, the first synthetic plastic, used in everything from telephones to atomic bomb casings. Framed by Tony's voice-over narration, the film introduces the Baekelands in their New York apartment, getting ready for an evening at the Stork Club. Barbara's movie-star handsome husband, Brooks (Stephen Dillane), is irritated with his chatterbox, neurotic wife. The evening progresses from public squabbling to dangerous behaviour, and finally, Barbara sexually abasing herself by way of apology.
Composed of six segments from 1946 to 1972, Howard Rodman's screenplay is set in soothingly tasteful apartments and villas that contrast with the increasingly bizarre behaviour of the Baekelands. As the father grows more distant, mother and son form an ever-more-suffocating bond. While the themes of family secrets, incest and murder might suggest Greek tragedy, the Baekelands seem to live on the surface of their impulses. They are people stuck on surfaces - the texture of a worsted suit, the squish of oil paint on an easel. Mired in petty sexual and social power games, and lost in a fog of drugs and alcohol, they seem to have no depth or warmth. The metaphor is implicit: This is the house that plastic built.
Tony's twisted childhood finally ends when the family heads to a Spanish resort in 1967. The teenager is seduced by a spooky beach bum, but fears his parents' disapproval. Tentatively, he picks up a pretty Spanish girl (Elena Anaya). When he brings her home to meet his parents ("like a kitten that has killed his first mouse and laid it at your feet," as Barbara says), his father steals the girl away and abandons his devastated wife.
Tony, left as his mother's sole source of emotional support, begins his own descent into mental illness. As she goes from shock into a perpetual mania, things progress from weird to worse. Kalin scrupulously avoids melodrama, and the performances are all the more alarming for being so understated. Moore has always had a talent for inducing empathy, which she has used to play a series of damaged housewives and mothers ( Safe, Map of the World). Here, she pushes the audience's tolerance in scenes of bizarre intimacy. English actor Redmayne, full-lipped and freckled, not only looks exactly right as the child of Moore and Dillane, he's at home in their company, capturing Tony's repressed hysteria and mental dissociation.
Savage Grace is produced by Christine Vachon, who sometimes presents these true-life tales of decadence and violence insightfully (as with Mary Harron's excellent I Shot Andy Warhol) and sometimes, as in Party Monster, with Macaulay Culkin as a homicidal club kid, she provokes without purpose. With Savage Grace, Kalin's stylized reserve and the understated performances achieve something unusual: Though the characters may be repellent, the film permits you to feel sympathy.