What is it about the particular chemistry between them that leads to murder? What happens when the balance of power and love becomes so out of whack in a relationship?” Kalin told an interviewer for the Boston Globe, “I’m fascinated by the idea of two people who become halves of a whole and commit a crime together. It is not entirely clear why the film was made. The filmmakers have made a genuine effort to recreate the atmosphere and sensibilities of earlier decades.Īvoiding pitfalls, however, even if they are all too commonplace at the present moment, is not the end all and be all of art. The work is attractively and carefully filmed. The performers, especially Moore and Dillane, do well. The motive force here does not seem to be sensationalism or voyeurism. Kalin and Rodman treat the deeply troubling events in an intelligent and sensitive manner. We learn from titles the fate of those left alive. The final and perhaps inevitable denouement occurs. Not surprisingly, Tony is drifting into a psychotic state. Barbara carries on with her hectic social life, still seeing or attempting to see the “best people,” but at home she initiates a sexual relationship with her son. In Paris, Barbara attempts suicide (one of numerous attempts), and later has her son apply salve to her stitched up wrists while she lies naked in the bathtub eating ice cream.īy 1972, mother and son are living in a flat in London, and both seem to be collapsing emotionally. She, her new friend and Tony all end up in bed together one night. She takes on a “walker,” a gay man who accompanies single women. Tony makes childlike efforts to reunite his parents, while his father hides from him.īarbara begins to unravel. Brooks promptly runs off with Blanca, abandoning his family for good. Tony (now played by Eddie Redmayne) brings home a girl friend, Blanca (Elena Anaya), much to his parents’ delight, although he’s far more attracted to boys. Some years later, in 1967, the family is staying on Spain’s fashionable Costa Brava. At this time, the son confronts smothering affection from his mother, perhaps rather forced, and reserve or contempt from his father, who’s convinced the boy is a homosexual. When the effort fails, Barbara explodes in rage, driving the visitors from the house. In 1959, in Paris, Tony, age 13, is forced to read passages from the Marquis de Sade out loud to the couple’s dinner guests. Unfortunately, these elements are never seriously developed in this rather noncommittal work. Something about the emptiness, carelessness and potential violence of the relationships comes across here. “For a million dollars, would you eat a pound of human flesh?” “Would you go to bed with the first person you met after going through a revolving door, for a million dollars?” Brooks nods yes to that, so Barbara declares, more or less, “If that’s the way you feel, I’ll just go off with the first man that comes along in a car,” and she does so, leaving her husband and friends on the sidewalk. They dine at the fashionable Stork Club in New York with the likes of Prince Aschwin of Lippe-Biesterfeld, brother of the Netherlands’ Prince Bernhard (and an ardent Nazi in the 1930s).Ī game is played at the table. Barbara (Julianne Moore) is beautiful and vivacious, Brooks (Stephen Dillane) handsome and debonair, as well as something of an intellectual. We first see the couple in New York in 1946, not long after their son’s birth. Screenwriter Howard Rodman and director Tom Kalin ( Swoon) based their film on the story of Barbara and Brooks Baekeland, the heir to the Bakelite plastics fortune, and their son, Tony, which culminated in a tragic murder in 1972. Savage Grace is a disturbing and painful drama, about an American family unhappy in any number of ways. Directed by Tom Kalin, screenplay by Howard Rodman, based on the book by Natalie Robins and Steven M.L.
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