Tom Kalin’s Savage Grace portrays a family spoiled rotten
At first director Tom Kalin holds Savage Grace’s viewers at arm’s length distracting them with flashy interiors of post-war New York nightlife hotspots and the all-but-alien lifestyle of the overtly rich and famous. Brooks Baekeland (Stephen Dillane) heir to the Bakelite fortune and forever caught in the shadow of his enterprising great-grandfather Leo endures a shallow marriage with Barbara Daly (Julianne Moore brilliant as ever). Despite the couple’s better judgment a son comes along in the form of Tony (played in adulthood by Eddie Redmayne) and his upbringing and unraveling forms Savage Grace’s twisted backbone.
“I was the steam when hot meets cold” Tony says in an even-keeled voiceover in the film’s opening moments before his parents head out to the Stork Club for another night of debauchery. Following a random tryst Barbara returns home hours after her husband and gingerly breastfeeds Tony just the innocent start of a brutally co-dependent relationship. More than her only son even as an infant Tony is her only source of genuine affection.
Fast-forward through a youth spent in Paris and a young adulthood spent in Spain and Tony’s sexual awakening unfurls through a thick haze of pot smoke and bisexual exploration. Following the defection of Brooks from the family home into the arms of Tony’s first lover Blanca (Elena Anaya) Barbara’s affection for her son turns unflinchingly incestuous. They share a lover in Sam (Hugh Dancy) Barbara’s high-profile society “walker” (slang for a gay male companion on the arm of a disgraced socialite) in one instance simultaneously. This unnatural relationship results in one of recent cinema’s most jaw-dropping sequences.
One of the biggest scandals in high-society history Tony’s murder of Barbara is Saving Grace’s tour de force moment. More than just a little boy lost Redmayne contains his anguish in wide popping eyes and jittering hands. When Moore slumps to the floor of their posh London flat Tony calls both the ambulance and the corner Chinese takeaway chewing noodles when the police inspector shuffles through the open front door. While so much of the film keeps us relatively uninvolved and uninvested — the majority of the characters are so shallow there’s nowhere for us to go — Kalin forces the audience to experience Savage Grace’s climactic sequence unblinkingly. It’s either taut cinematic planning or a cruel trick — the final lashing out of a family so destroyed and dependent it has nowhere else to go unleashed as one of the film’s few moments of genuine emotion and served with a side of noodles.
Kalin’s affections have remained much the same since his 1992 debut Swoon retold the infamous 1920s Leopold and Loeb kidnapping and murder case. His camera is again trained on the decadent rich with too much money in their pockets and too much time on their hands. Given its similarity in tone lush visuals and homosexual undertones it’s tempting to consider Savage Grace the anti- Far From Heaven Todd Haynes’s 2002 update of Douglas Sirk-style melodrama. While it’s definitely a hard film to get into and given its subject matter and shattering pay-off even harder to truly enjoy Savage Grace at least marks the return of a unique cinematic voice.
