Home > Chicago Movies > Movie Review > Movie review: 'Savage Grace'

2 stars (out of four)

Murder among the rich, fabulous and screwy: I mean, why else do we go to the movies? The true story of Barbara Baekeland, jet-setting, ill-fated wife of the heir of the Bakelite dinnerware fortune, offers the ingredients of a very juicy picture, one a dozen different directors could cook a dozen different ways. Yet “Savage Grace” comes up bland and seems to go nowhere in particular. When it was over I wanted to ask the director Tom Kalin some questions. What compelled you to make a movie about these people? What about their story, one of mother love/hate and incest and louche morals (to say nothing of the loose ones), really drove you to them? And why has it been left out of the film?

Julianne Moore almost makes it worth seeing. The film begins in post-World War II Manhattan, among the Stork Club and 21 set. Dashing Brooks Baekeland (Stephen Dillane) has already cooled his feelings toward his wife (Moore) to the freezing point, and the birth of their son, Tony, only exacerbates the trouble.

Thus begins a mother/son saga that skips from New York to Paris to Spain and, finally, fatally, to London. The grown Tony is played by Eddie Redmayne. His bisexual awakening has his parents quivering, and as Brooks moves further out of shrill, brittle Barbara’s orbit, the attention Barbara pays to Tony becomes increasingly fraught.

The book “Savage Grace” by Natalie Robins and Steven M.L. Aronson is an addictive read—an oral history of a storied family’s privilege and scandal. The film, taken from a script by Howard A. Rodman, plays everything at a cool, determinedly non-judgmental remove. For various reasons Rodman downplays the Baekelands’ celebrity orbit. But the exotic domestic circle on view is surprisingly square.

A shame, because Moore is ready to rumble. She has big, unruly stuff in her arsenal (though too often her film roles confine her to placid terrain), and this is a role—bitter, complicated, full of deceptive layers and hidden impulses—to unloose that arsenal. Barbara Baekeland was, after all, like Bakelite: Shiny, ultra-presentable, nearly unbreakable. Yet “Savage Grace” is content to glide along, and while its key performances are intelligent, none of the writing activates these real-life characters fully.

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