‘Savage Grace’
Director: Tom Kalin
Cast: Julianne Moore, Eddie Redmayne, Stephen Dilane
Rating: R
Grade: 2 Globes
REVIEW. Like Michael Haneke’s recent update of “Funny Games,” “Savage Grace” punishes its viewers for getting their kicks. It is too silly to be serious, too perverse to be silly, and leaves you with that icky feeling you get after rubbernecking your way past a car crash.
PROFILE. Julianne Moore sits on a couch at Manhattan’s Regency hotel, paging through decades old family photographs of the Baekelands — father Brooks, son Tony and mother Barbara, to whom Moore, with her high cheekbones, red hair and pale complexion, bears a striking resemblance — reproduced in the book “Savage Grace,” on which her new film of the same title is based.
“Look at this one!” she says, pointing to a photo of Barbara mimicking her infant son’s expression. It’s next to a drawing Barbara made of her son nursing at her breast. “They were very close. Some of the pictures from when he was a child are so beautiful — and kind of unusual. There’s an interesting, obsessive quality to them. And here” — she points to a photograph of Tony, then in his twenties, and his mother, wearing a Chanel suit and pearls, in their New York penthouse during the ’70s — “they look like an old married couple.” In fact, the intimacy between mother and son eventually resulted in a storyline that resembles epic Greek tragedy, one in which son murders mother.
Barbara, a professional beauty, grew up in Boston and came to New York to marry rich. After a brief flirtation with John Jacob Astor, she married Brooks Baekeland, the heir to the Bakelite plastic fortune — what Brooks liked to refer to as “f--- you money.” “They had a lot of money and no jobs,” says Moore. “Brooks felt himself to be a writer; Barbara would say she was a painter. But basically, they were dilettantes. They didn’t need to work and they were more interested in society than anything else.”
The film takes the Baekelands from the Stork club in the ’40s through the ’50s, ’60s and early ’70s as they roamed through New York, London, Paris and Spain.
“I had her speak in a much more formal, more movie-like way at the beginning, then I let her speech relax a little as we went into the ’70s, just to give it some kind of shape,” Moore says. “She’s got that Mid-Atlantic, affected kind of speech.” Barbara’s haute couture —slender Dior dresses, a hot pink ’60s Givenchy minidress, ’70s Moroccan caftans — also helps place the film in a specific time and place.
Barbara Baekeland is now best known for the spectacular circumstances surrounding her death. “But in life, we’re not villains and not victims,” says Moore. “The challenge was keeping it in scale, making it human. Sometimes you’ll be in a room at a party and someone will be exhibiting monstrous behavior. But it’s not outsized; it’s not as cinematic as we believe. That’s the way Barbara was. She was insidious. She had plenty of admirers. And yet her behavior was over the line.”