Barbara Baekeland (Julianne Moore) is mommy dearest to Tony (Eddie Redmayne).
Money can't buy happiness. The almost entirely obvious movie Savage Grace makes that point and a few more obvious ones, as well. Directed by Tom Kalin (Swoon) from the novel (subtitled The True Story of Fatal Relations in a Rich and Famous American Family) by Natalie Robins and Steven M. L. Aronson, Savage Grace is a fact-based story in which Julianne Moore (who has cornered the market in purse-lipped tortured housewife roles) plays Barbara Baekeland, a monstrously narcissistic, unhappily married social climber whose straying husband Brooks (Stephen Dillane) is heir to a mammoth plastics fortune. Barbara plays out her sordid life against chic, glittering locales like Paris and the Mediterranean while obsessing over her young son Tony (played by the young Barney Clark and, later, by the older Eddie Redmayne) who, in turn, obsesses over guys and girls, with a decided preference for the former.
Tony (Eddie Redmayne) serenades beach acquaintance Black Jake (Unax Ugalde).
In an episodic film stylishly directed, beautifully shot and laced with welcome doses of bleak humor, we watch Barbara systematically annihilate her poor kid by doing things like having him read aloud to her fellow socialites passages from de Sade's Justine and later sharing a bed with him and his bisexual lover (Hugh Dancy). The superb Moore makes a feast out of her role and Dillane is awfully good as the remote, controlling plastics fortune heir. But the movie's claustrophobic airlessness and annoying technique of jumping back and forth over almost 30 years of narrative drain most of the lurid juice out of what could have been a whopper of a melodrama. Only those who can't get enough of watching despicable people treat each other despicably need rush to the theater.
Photos: ©2007 Monfort Producciones S.L - Lace Curtain Productions Inc.-Celluloid Dreams. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
