This is generally not the season moviegoers head out to see docudramas about decadent rich families who get caught up in death spirals of madness, incest and murder. Even still, Savage Grace could be construed as a different breed of summer movie, one that offers a view of the sort of permanent summer enjoyed by moneyed libertines in sunny Mediterranean locales. It’d be an existence worth envying if this particular example of the good life didn’t turn so queasy and rotten.
Julianne Moore and Stephen Dillane star as Barbara and Brooks Baekeland, wealthy socialites who owe their fortune to Brooks’s grandfather, the inventor of Bakelite plastic. Putting the idle in idle rich, they flit around America and Europe in the ’50s and ’60s with son Tony in tow. As the boy enters his teens (he’s played as a young man by The Good Shepherd’s Eddie Redmayne), circumstances grow more toxic due to the worsening warfare between Brooks and Barbara and the sexual competition that develops between all three family members. Barbara’s highly questionable parenting methods don’t benefit Tony much, either.
A tragic outcome is inevitable, and not to be described here in hopes of preserving some surprises, but Savage Grace — the first feature by Tom Kalin since Swoon (1992), a landmark in the American indie scene’s brief but eventful wave of “New Queer Cinema” — is about much more than the crime that made the Baekelands infamous. Instead, it’s a chilling portrait of familial disintegration and the poisonous side-effects of the ’60s vogue for liberation of all varieties.
The project began when producer Christine Vachon gave Kalin — who spent much of the 15 years after Swoon developing projects that didn’t quite come to fruition, including biopics about Patti Smith and garage-rock pioneers the Monks — a copy of Savage Grace, Natalie Robins and Steven M.L. Aronson’s book about the Baekelands’ bizarre private life. Inspired by photos (including one from 1972 in which Barbara and Tony, as Kalin says, “look totally like husband and wife”), the director and screenwriter Howard Rodman let several key days represent three decades’ worth of action.
“It just seemed more interesting to dig in deep and see those moments as turning points,” Kalin says in a phone interview from New York. “It was also a way of embracing the limitations of the approach, since this is not a giant Hollywood movie with an enormous budget. It was a movie that had to be achieved precisely and economically, so having the parts stand in for the whole became a strong way of telling the story. It also creates tension about what you leave off screen.”
What’s more, it means that Savage Grace is not the salacious true-crime story it might’ve been. It is something more ambiguous and elusive, especially in regards to its take on Barbara. “If you look at the real photographs, you could’ve mistaken her for the perfect, doting, loving mother and she probably was,” says Kalin. “Julianne is very strong on this idea, and I think she’s right about how much Barbara really loved Tony and how much tenderness there was between them. It’s that the tenderness just overshoots its mark terribly — it’s this narcissistic compulsion that doesn’t ever find proportion. There aren’t appropriate boundaries between them. The scene when she walks in the bathroom when he’s in the bathtub is again based on a photo of Tony at that age when he’s naked in the tub — the photo was clearly taken by Barbara.”
That the movie refuses to portray any of the characters as monstrous may be one reason why Savage Grace has provoked such a wide array of responses since it debuted at Cannes last year. “The tone of the movie was a very difficult one to achieve,” Kalin explains. “I think the actors brought a lot of compassion and didn’t judge the characters they were playing. There’s also a certain amount of discomforting humour in the movie, particularly around the sex, yet I don’t think the laughter turns it into camp. Then there’s the combinations of these very strong, even operatic emotions and the certain amount of coolness with which it’s rendered. I didn’t want to tell this story in a breathy voice somehow — to rhapsodize about it seemed really wrong.”
That discomfiting mix is something Savage Grace shares with Contempt, Belle de Jour and The Servant, three films which inspired Kalin and may very well have been enjoyed by Barbara and Tony back in the ’60s. His movie also shares their reluctance to provide an easy emotional catharsis for viewers or direct their responses to these events.
“People have somehow become angered by how I’ve told this story,” says Kalin. “My frustration with that reaction is that it blinds people to the amazing work of the actors. Blame me if you have to because that’s my choice in how the material is used. It’s interesting, because if you go back and read the source material, I could’ve gone much further than I went.”
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