Film

Savage Grace (2007)

Director: Tom Kalin

Movie review

From Time Out Chicago

If you’ve heard anything at all about the Baekelands—of New York, Paris, the Spanish coast and London—it probably involved word of a wealthy family, mother-son incest and murder in the early ’70s. Savage Grace cautiously fills in some of the gaps: Mom Barbara (a fearless Moore) wearied husband Brooks (Dillane) with her whims and dalliances, and he eventually ran off with their son’s girlfriend (Anaya). Son Antony (mainly played by Redmayne) blamed his mother’s increasing instability on his father’s absence, and Barbara, looking for companionship, turned to her aloof and somewhat antisocial son, who was mostly—to Barbara’s apparent frustration—gay.

Linear compared to Kalin’s Swoon (his 1992 gloss on the Leopold and Loeb murders), Grace doesn’t—and probably couldn’t—explain the events that unfolded, instead choosing to present the story in queasy tableaux: Barbara is uncomfortably intimate with her son from an early age, just down the hall from his defloration and later shown laughing heartily before their possible threesome. Kalin cannily cuts away before certain assignations, leaving viewers to wonder exactly what happened.

Shot in a bright, neo-Sirkian lighting scheme, with lush scoring and a constant undercurrent of menace, Grace is a handsomely strange production. What lets the movie down is Howard A. Rodman’s script, which ultimately has little on its mind beyond recounting the lurid details. What we’re left with are all the signifiers of subversive, coolly intellectualized filmmaking—but nothing clear signified.