Savage Grace	by George Sax

Bakelite, you may or may not be interested in knowing, was “the first truly synthetic resin, phenol formaldehyde, or phenolic, developed by the German chemist Leo Baekeland and patented in 1907,” according to Eric Knowles in his book, Discovering Antiques. In plainer terms, it was the first successful plastic, widely employed in fashioning jewelry, furniture and decorative objects, particularly in Art Deco designs.

I only relate these facts because Tom Kalin’s Savage Grace deals, in its fashion, with a couple of Leo Baekeland’s descendents, although the real center of the film is Barbara Baekeland (Julianne Moore), who married Leo’s shiftless grandson Brooks (Stephen Dillane) in the late 1940s.

The Barbara in this version (adapted by Howard Rodman from a book by Natalie Robins and Steven M.L. Aronson) is a histrionic monster of neurotic self-regard and decidedly eccentric ideas of parental responsibility. The movie is really about her suffocating, infantalizing relations with her young gay son Tony (Eddie Redmayne), relations that are always implicitly incestuous, and are finally more concretely so. She corrupts and cripples Tony, who eventually loses what tenuous balance of mind he has, with horrific results.

Kalin might have approached all this as grist for a guiltily delicious expose with elements of Gothic farce, but he is nothing if not soberly serious. Sixteen years ago, he directed his only other feature, Swoon, a dourly didactic Queer Studies treatment of the 1924 Loeb-Leopold murder case. Here, he has heavy-handedly focused on the crudely portrayed Oedipal aspects of the Baekelands’ tale, and the result is a kind of distasteful but zipless sensationalism.

Savage Grace is draggy and off-putting even as it dutifully shows us the degenerate plight of this aimless, overprivileged trio. Kalin seems to be under the impression that he’s revealing the sympathetic as well as the depraved elements in the story, but none of these Baekelands is even interesting. It scarcely helps that Kalin’s techniques and aesthetic choices sometimes make the film look something like a 1970s soft-porn movie.

Rather than the riveting portrait of a deranging Freudian family romance, the film’s Barbara is a cartoonish maternal grotesque who may put Catherine the Great and James Cagney’s emasculating mother in White Heat in her shadow, always sure that she’s the victim, of course. Eventually, she is.

—george sax