Pay Back

Tom Kalin's Savage Grace deftly captures the rise and fall of the rich, twisted Baekelands.

by Sam Adams

Recommended

MOMMY DIREST: The Baekelands' story takes a disturbing turn when mother (Julianne Moore) and son (Eddie Redmayne) are left on their own. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

"One of the uses of money is that it allows us not to live with the consequences of our mistakes." Those words, attributed to plastics millionaire Leo Baekeland and spoken by his grandson Brooks, hang over Savage Grace like a warning from the gods. A delicate cross between classical tragedy and true-crime novel, the movie is set among the idle rich of postwar Europe, where Brooks (Stephen Dillane) and his wife, Barbara (Julianne Moore), bask in the Mediterranean sun and the reflected glow of literary lions. Brooks is a self-styled adventurer, and Barbara dabbles in painting, but their main occupation is being themselves, or rather, the selves they wish to be.

Moore has often played women whose flawless exteriors mask a private pain, but she has never played a character so violently at odds with herself. The movie makes much of the fact that Barbara briefly tried her hand at acting before marrying rich. Her whole life is a performance, though not always a successful one. She coos over a French scholar, attempting to impress him with questions like, "So, was Proust truly a homosexual?" But when she senses that her charade has provoked condescension rather than acceptance, she is instantly feral, hurling insults in pidgin French with the fury of a scorned goddess.

The Baekelands' marriage might have been merely poisonous and not catastrophic had they had the wisdom not to reproduce. Their son, Tony, has his father's linguistic ease and his mother's need to please, with the careless air of one who's always known his future was assured. Eddie Redmayne, who takes over the role when Tony reaches adolescence, has floppy, sun-streaked hair and a wide, unsullied face that makes him seem open to the world and endlessly vulnerable.

Even when Tony is in his crib, Brooks and Barbara's relationship is one of expediency and open contempt, and it only grows more poisonous as they all grow older. When the marriage eventually shatters, Barbara and Tony are left alone with each other, and the film retreats from the outside world. Barbara is still acting, but for an audience of one, and perhaps herself as well.

Although the Baekelands' story is fact, revealing its ending would serve only to make Savage Grace sound sordid and exploitative, which it emphatically is not. One of the things that makes Tom Kalin's film so effective is that as the Baek-elands' saga grows more complicated, his approach grows simpler. By the time their actions flower into their full perversity, Juan Miguel Azpiroz's camera only watches.

Once hailed as a progenitor of New Queer Cinema alongside the likes of Todd Haynes, Kalin's last (and first) feature was 1992's Swoon, a dreamy black-and-white revisitation of the Leopold and Loeb murders. Savage Grace shares an obvious bond with the (much) earlier work, but its impact is more gradual, cumulatively devastating rather than instantly striking. Howard Rodman's self-consciously literate script has its share of pungent moments, but many are apparent only in hindsight. The movie strenuously refrains from psychologizing its characters, but the final sickening twists of plot are almost subliminally foreshadowed. It makes the unthinkable seem inevitable.

Without descending into camp, Moore plays Barbara on the edge of caricature, an elegant monster with a heart full of knives. But when Barbara falters, we see the fear and anguish behind the would-be grand dame. When she catches Brooks in the airport with another woman, she lashes out at him with imperious fury, hoping to achieve greatness even in defeat. But as she turns away, her face begins to crack and the loss and confusion pours through. Moore accomplishes this feat in a single, unmoving shot, her resolve shattering as she walks toward the camera, with a simplicity that evokes Bette Davis or Barbara Stanwyck.

Some viewers, and not a few reviewers, are plainly repulsed by Savage Grace's subject matter, and one can hardly blame them. But Kalin's delicacy and insight more than justify the voyage into such fetid waters. The Baekelands do not, finally, escape the consequences of their actions. Their privilege merely delays the reckoning, and allows their faults to become deficits no amount of money can balance.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Savage Grace | Directed by Tom Kalin | An IFC Films release