Reel Politique: Movie Review, Savage Grace
Savage Grace is playing for three more days at the Cinema 21, and it’s the kind of movie that makes you wonder why it was made in the first place. A “true crime” film, but much briefer than a similar work you’d get on a network as a mini-series, Savage Grace tells the tale of Barbara Daly Baekeland, who was married for a time to the heir of the Bakelite plastic fortune, Brooks Baekeland. Though all of Baekelands were nouveau riche Brooks was apparently very good at looking and sounding like old money, while Barbara was an arriviste whose act of hypergamy ultimately ended in divorce, incest, and murder. Barbara was unusually close to her son Antony, and after Brooks “stole” Antony’s young Spanish girlfriend (not that he really cared, as he was gay), his own mother eventually stole his current lover, a “walker” helping Barbara get through her divorce, and in the end Barbara was her own son’s lover, if only briefly, according to the movie, before Antony stabbed her to death in the kitchen of their London flat. The police found him sitting on the floor, eating Chinese food from a carry out box over her corpse.
The time frame of the film ranges from 1947 in New York when Antony is a baby to Paris when he is a type and then Spain when he is young man smoking pot with his equally young drug smuggling boyfriend, and finally to London, where, on November 17, 1972, he killed Barbara. Apparently fascinating books have been written about the 30-year-old case, but the film is static, exterior, and obviously making a brief for Antony as a dually damaged child. Antony went on, by the way, to an insane asylum, from which he was eventually released to live with his grandmother in 1980, whom he also in turn stabbed, though not fatally. He committed suicide in Riker’s Island. It’s an expensive looking film, with all its lush, well-tailored settings, but is as episodic as a TV biopic, and just as perplexing when you contemplate what the point of the film is supposed to be in the first place, since its muted presentation obviously eschews sensationalism.
Savage Grace is directed by Tom Kalin, whose earlier true crime tale was Swoon, a supposed indie film from 1992 renderng a highly sympathetic, even envious account of Leopold and Loeb, the Chicago child murderers. In other words, Kalin is an “agenda” filmmaker whose stance appears to be that gayness excuses everything. Thus the emotional center of Savage Grace is supposed to be Antony, when in the actual experience, Barbara is the fascinating character because her motivations are much more mysterious.
Despite the muffled affect of the film, it is generally well acted, perhaps because the stars got to wear a higher class of clothing. Stephen Dillane is excellent and in his small gestures and looks fascinating as Brooks, while Julianne Moore gives yet another brave, nuanced performance. Only Eddie Redmayne as the adult Antony comes across as a dud, whiny in his voice-over letter to his father (which we learn at the end is written from the asylum), and uninteresting to look at.
Savage Grace ends on the 17th, with showtimes at 7 and 9:10 PM, with more information available at the Cinema 21 website.