DIRECTED BY: TOM KALIN
STARRING: JULIANNE MOORE, STEPHEN DILLANE, EDDIE REDMAYNE
MONEY, madness, sex, drugs, incest and murder are at the heart of Savage Grace, the true-life story of New York socialite Barbara D
aly Baekeland who was killed in 1972 by the gay son she was having a sexual relationship with. If that sounds like a shocking tale of intrigue and depravity amid the rich and shameless, director Tom Kalin does his best to drain it of any interest by shooting for icy austerity and ending up with histrionic melodrama.
Things aren't helped by Julianne Moore, who flirts with typecasting to play Barbara as yet another desperate, unstable housewife whose insecurity about marrying into money manifests itself in the obsessive relationship she forms with her son.
Played as a young man by Eddie Redmayne, his pampered upbringing as a mummy's boy whose father has no qualms about stealing his girlfriends leads to much sexual confusion as he experiments with both women and men – before his mother starts getting in on the action, that is.
Unfortunately, episodic structuring and an absence of psychological insights rob these details of any impact and, in the end, the film conforms to Oscar Wilde's definition of scandal as "gossip made tedious by morality".
The full article contains 216 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
