Savage Grace

Tom Kalin’s Savage Grace, his first feature film in 15 years and the long-awaited follow-up to his 1992 Swoon, stays with you and is nothing if not unsettling (and watchable), but that doesn’t mean it's any good.

The entire endeavor is oddly flat, with emotionally unreachable characters and lots of pretty background vistas, but it comes across as a bit of a travelogue that must end badly. Kalin manages to portray a world of decadent, unlikable, cultured people writhing, even in their wealth, with status anxiety and, not surprisingly, overcome by sexual dysfunction, without attempting either to understand their malaise or to particularly care. Like his earlier film, Kalin has taken a lurid true crime, in this case the murder of Barbara Baekeland, a high-strung, social-climbing, ex-actress who married the bakelite plastics heir Brooks (Stephen Dillane, strong as always), sired him a son, and was offed by the latter with a particularly large kitchen knife following her most brazenly incestuous act. This is dark stuff, but without suggesting much of the inner lives of the troubled Baekelands during a decade and a half as they trot across Europe tearing each other apart, the film leaves us in the dark about just how Barbara Baekeland got to the point where she thought it was okay to have sex with her homosexual son on the living room couch.

For a film that hinges on this action, Kalin and his screenwriter Howard Rodman seem oddly timid in attempting to unearth the mysteries of Barbara Baekeland--it is her son’s movie after all, his prison-bound letter to his estranged father providing the framework for the film’s narrative, but Antony gets short shrift too. As portrayed by Eddie Redmayne, who is making a career of playing the tortured son of powerful men and neurotic women (see Robert DeNiro’s vastly underrated The Good Shepard or the clunky Focus period piece The Other Boleyn Girl), Tony, despite the voiceover he’s given and the way he’s prioritized in the editing, remains an enigma.

Of course, no filmmaker (or psychoanalyst) could ever be comfortably certain of what made these folks tick, but we’d expect one with Kalin's skill to give us a bit more in terms of nuanced characterization. Instead, he steers the normally solid Jullianne Moore, Dillane, and Redmayne toward oblique vindictiveness, melancholia, and WASPy airs without giving us hints into their psychology that would have helped make this a more satisfying experience. The three central players, as portrayed by a talented if misguided cast, are not worth our time, pity, or contemplation.

                                                              Brandon Harris