Review: Savage Grace

Julianne Moore is some kind of great in Savage Grace, but the film? Not so much. Tom Kalin's adaptation of Natalie Robins and Steven M.L. Aronson's provocative true-crime book centers on the life of Barbara Baekeland (Moore), her well-off husband Brooks (Stephen Dillane), and their son Tony (Eddie Redmayne), a dysfunctional clan if ever there was one. It's a tale of the screwed-up wealthy, spanning their ups and downs from 1946 to 1972, when their myriad hang-ups and compulsions finally culminated in perverse tragedy. Episodically constructed by screenwriter Howard A. Rodman, the narrative - full of drugs, back-stabbing, affairs, three-ways, and taboo sexual relations - revolves around the type of sordid stuff tabloids live for, though the director treats his inherently sensationalistic material with cool meticulousness, as if a serious approach might somehow counteract the overarching mood of scandalous tawdriness. It doesn't, which isn't to say that this reserved tack doesn't effectively grip one's attention. Yet the delicacy of Kalin's presentation, which is infused with more than a dash of self-conscious Sirkian artifice, never quite meshes with Barbara and Tony's descent into twisted psychosis.

And what a gloriously messy freefall it is. The film opens shortly after Tony's birth, and already, the family appears destined for ruin. Brooks is a decorated army man who now lives off his inheritance and spends most of his time badmouthing his spouse and ignoring and/or disparaging his son, verbal vitriol stemming from the low self-esteem that comes from being a decadent layabout. Brooks seems embarrassed by the fact that he's done little to obtain his social standing, and accordingly compensates with snobbery and nastiness, and Barbara is even more desperate to show that she deserves the aristocratic position she's acquired via marriage, orchestrating dinner parties and get-togethers in a vain effort to prove herself worthy of being in upper crust company. Savage Grace makes clear that Brooks is, deep down, a foppish loser and Barbara is, regardless of elegant clothes and jet-setting lifestyle, an uncultured idiot, and the contentious, unhappy dichotomy between appearances and reality soon fosters a warped dynamic that's amplified by Barbara's increasingly unhealthy relationship with her beloved boy Tony.

As his youth is spent traveling from one gorgeous European locale to another, Tony's upbringing - first with both parents and, after Brooks takes off with a girl Tony dated in Majorca, with just Mom - lacks for stability save for the near-and-dear presence of Barbara, who winds up being the role model from hell. The director depicts Barbara and Tony's profligate day-to-day with both chilly bemusement and melodramatic cheesiness, and there's some deviant verve to some of the characters' manipulative tête-à-têtes. However, despite a quite intense focus on these two protagonists, Kalin and Rodman never quite get beyond a superficial portrait of Tony, whose haughtiness, bisexuality, and chaotic psychological issues feel sketched rather than fully drawn. There's no doubt that Tony's problems are largely the byproduct of Barbara's appalling parenting. But the young man's confusion, bitterness, and Oedipal obsession - culminating in a riveting act of horrific love and violence that, as the film's main selling point, won't be spoiled here - persistently come across as poses rather than actual personality traits.

Whereas Redmayne is more interested in pouting his lips than emoting from the gut, and while Kalin's respectable aesthetic often seems an insincere veneer masking exploitative urges, Moore is downright magnificent as Barbara. Strutting about with undeserved egomania, freaking out with pathetic recklessness, and ingratiating herself into Tony's life with a ghastly mixture of want and need, she's a vision of wretched monstrousness embodied by Moore with confrontational snootiness that can barely conceal a craven hunger for status and respect. A scene in which Barbara forces an uncomfortable young Tony to read a passage from the Marquise de Sade's Justine for guests - a cringe-worthy act of psychological abuse - and then lambastes one of the visitors for making a crude comment about her derrière in French is pure diva brilliance, her righteous fury almost as mesmerizing as is the revulsion elicited by a later ménage-a-trois between Barbara, Tony and Barbara's gay confidante (Hugh Dancy). Even when Savage Grace treats her like a fascinatingly freakish oddball, Moore assiduously avoids camp, expressing pungent, thorny madness as this most pitiful and hideous of mommy dearests.

For more on Savage Grace, see Kim's review from Sundance.