Tagline: Truth is more shocking than fiction.
Savage Grace is a film directed by Tom Kalin and written by Howard A. Rodman, based on the book Savage Grace by Natalie Robins and Steven M.L. Aronson. The story is based on the dysfunctional, allegedly incestuous relationship between heiress and socialite Barbara Daly Baekeland and her son, Antony. The film stars Julianne Moore, Stephen Dillane, Eddie Redmayne, Elena Anaya and Hugh Dancy. It was an official selection at the 2007 London Film Festival, the 2007 Sundance Film Festival and the 2007 Cannes Film Festival.
The true story of the Baekeland family–the inventors of Bakelite–and their descent into sexual obsession and murder. The journey is told though the dramatization of the shocking Barbara Daly Baekeland murder case, which happened in a posh London flat in 1972.
Julianne Moore stars in this dramatization of the shocking Barbara Daly Baekeland murder case, which happened in a posh London flat on Friday 17 November 1972. The bloody crime caused a stir on both sides of the Atlantic and remains one of the most memorable American Tragedies. Based on the Natalie Robins book.
Barbara Daly, the dashing heir to the Bakelite plastics fortune, married above her class to Brooks Baekeland. Beautiful, red-headed and charismatic, Barbara is still no match for her well-bred husband. The birth of the couple’s only child, Tony, rocks the uneasy balance in this marriage of extremes. Tony is a failure in his father’s eyes.
Review
A sick-room torpor hangs heavily about this masterfully controlled, elegantly composed movie by Tom Kalin, his first full-length feature since the much-admired Swoon from 1992. It is a sensational, lurid story: erotic and repulsive by overlapping turn. And it’s pulp fact. Barbara Daly was the would-be actress, artist and social alpinist who in postwar New York married wealthy Brooks Baekeland, a travel writer and heir to the Bakelite fortune. Her drinking, her propensity for making a scene in public, and her weakness for pseudo-bohemian adulterous flings evidently made the marriage a living hell. She could find a smothering intimacy only with her gay son, Tony Daly. Mother, father and son created a dysfunctional love triangle which ended in violence and bloodshed.
Julianne Moore plays Barbara – and after this film, and movies like The Hours and Far from Heaven, she is in danger of being typecast as the high-camp suffering mother. But this is a fierce and interesting refinement of the role. Her Barbara is always boiling internally with need: need for love, for tenderness, for social affirmation. After completing some paintings, including one awful Woolworths-type self-portrait with child, she organises an exhibition and scrapes up acquaintance with patrician artistic types in London, angling to use one of their salons as the venue for the post-vernissage luncheon. “Of course I shall host your little party,” says one grande dame, and Barbara flinches imperceptibly at the put-down, recovers in an instant and is oleaginously grateful and relieved: Moore conveys the sequence of facial events with great precision.
Stephen Dillane plays Brooks, himself seething with a sense of inferiority, in his case to his grandfather, the inventor of Bakelite plastic and the alpha-male ancestor and high-achiever in comparison to whom his life is as nothing. Eddie Redmayne plays the beautiful, cosseted Tony, whose own jottings do not result in any Proustian achievement, but merely a languid, rancid dissatisfaction.
Kalin contrives a series of spacious historical episodes showing the family’s wanderings over 30 years from New York to Paris, Spain and finally London. Tony is enamoured of Blanca (Elena Anaya), a beautiful young Spanish woman to whom he surrenders his virginity – a brilliant, uncomfortable scene – while his parents are next door, but this liaison is to lead to an appalling betrayal, which throws Tony into even closer intimacy with his mother.
It is a story of the very rich, a milieu rarely and not always convincingly rendered in the movies: a brittle world of selfish people who are never sympathetic and often never even comprehensible. Appropriately for the leisured classes, Kalin has an eye for the mood and feeling of ennui. When Tony helps his mother from the bath, the camera lingers on her knees and she looks as vulnerable as a sickly child. This is a gripping, coldly brilliant and tremendously acted movie.
Production notes provided by IFC First Take.
Savage Grace
Starring: Julianne Moore, Stephen Dillane, Eddie Redmayne, Elena Anaya, Unax Ugalde, Belén Rueda, Hugh Dancy
Directed by: Tom Kalin
Screenplay by: Howard A. Rodman
Release Date: May 30th, 2008
MPAA Rating: None.
Studio: IFC First Take
Box Office Totals
Domestic: $435,746 (33.8%)
Foreign: $853,271 (66.2%)
Total: $1,289,017 (Worldwide)