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Savage GraceDefinitely not the movie you want to watch with mother, this true tale of sexual perversity, jealousy and madness among the decadent set is engrossing enough as a case study, but likely to leave you feeling a bit queasy before, during and after.
Julianne Moore plays Barbara Daly, a former actress who married above her station. Brooks Baekeland (Stephen Dillane) is an upper-class Brit who never tires of bemoaning the fortune his inherited from his grandfather, who invented Bakelite plastic. Barbara blames the cracks that rupture her marriage on the birth of son Tony (in 1946). But the polite European society she is determined to win over is unforgiving of her erratic behaviour, her coarse outbursts and manifest lack of education. Brooks is diffident and rudderless, possibly a repressed homosexual, increasingly embarrassed by his wife. Eventually he leaves her for a much younger woman who has been sleeping with the teenage Tony (Eddie Redmayne). Tony doesn’t mind that too much – he already suspects he’s gay – but he’s distraught to be abandoned by his father, and Barbara plunges into a potentially suicidal depression. No one here is likeable, and it’s not easy to feel sorry for such privileged jet-setters (the film shuttles between New York, Paris, London and sundry Mediterranean villas, 1946-1972), though to be sure we can see how poor Tony ended up the way he did.
“Tony is who Tony is,” remarks his father at one point, to which Barbara barks a shrill and adamant “NO!” Tony is who Barbara decides to make him, that’s the point. He has her color – her red hair and freckles – and on some level she wants him to have the life denied her by birth and gender (an instinct most parents will recognise). She educates him, fashions him, and shows him off as the whim takes her. But at other times she’s neglectful and simply not there. Because sex has been her own stepping stone – it’s maybe what she’s best at – she’s not shy about nurturing that side of her son too. But she’ll be damned if he grows up queer. Directed by Tom Kalin from a script by Howard Rodman, Savage Grace has the kind of raw material that might furnish a Tennessee Williams’ play. But Kalin et al don’t compress it into one fraught night, as Williams might have, they skip through the years, charting relationships that descend into rare levels of toxicity with a chilly (though not chilling) scientific dispassion. On the one hand this long-ranging chronology allows Moore to sketch a multifaceted portrait of a fading diva fighting to claim her space in the world. On the other, it makes this already tough-to-love movie all the more alienating – and that’s before we even get to the lurid climax, a disturbing sequence destined to separate any remaining sheep from the goats.
Kalin comes from the “New Queer Cinema” school of US independents, along with the likes of producer Christine Vachon and directors Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven; Safe) Gregg Araki (Mysterious Skin). His only previous film was Swoon, about the famous Leopold and Loeb murder that also inspired Rope and Compulsion. But Swoon was way back in 1992 – he’s been AWOL a long time, and it’s not hard to see why if this is the kind of project he’s been pushing. That’s not meant as a dig, but it’s an uncompromisingly uncommercial sensibility we’re dealing with, and the movie sometimes feels stilted and over-wrought. I would recommend the movie for Moore’s formidable performance, which certainly chimes with her work in Far From Heaven, The Hours and Safe in its underlying sympathy for a brittle, strident, narcissistic and fatally misguided woman. But, obviously, proceed with caution… Tom Charity Titles related to this articleRelated/similar articles
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