Savage Grace (2007)
Directed by Tom Kalin
This examination of a famous scandal from the 1970s explores the relationship between Barbara Baekeland and her only son, Antony. Barbara, a lonely social climber unhappily married to the wealthy but remote plastics heir Brooks Baekeland, dotes on Antony, who is homosexual. As Barbara tries to "cure" Antony of his sexuality -- sometimes by seducing him herself -- the groundwork is laid for a murderous tragedy.
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Bertolucci's Luna) to finally slaughtering the boozy Jocasta.
Dark humor, along the lines of "The Honeymoon Killers," gives way to fractured set pieces that gesture toward the film’s gratuitous climax, one that’s destined to bestow upon it a cult status.
The direction by Tom Kalin (“Swoon”), working from Howard A. Rodman’s adaptation of Natalie Robins and Steven M.L. Aronson’s book, is fluid and occasionally compelling.
Director Tom Kalin ("Swoon") manages the difficult feat of being shocking without becoming sensationalistic.
His debut, "Swoon" (1992), was based on the case of Leopold and Loeb, wealthy young students who kidnapped and killed a boy in 1924.
Kalin contemplated the Leopold-Loeb case with arch moodiness in his 1992 debut Swoon, and has not expanded his cinematic vocabulary in the 16 years since: The most shocking thing about Savage Grace is its flatness, the leadenness of its symbolism (stuffed animals, a dead dog's collar, little boys shooting empty bottles) and the squandering of Moore's dedicated search for vestiges of human flesh in her character's vampiristic skeleton.
But director Tom Kalin (Swoon) distills its most sordid ingredients into a heady brew that hits you like a stun gun.
“Savage Grace” is the juicy screen version of those events, and director Tom Kalin (“Swoon”) treats the nightmare with a perfect pitch of melodrama and hysterics, easing into the discomfort of obscene sexual violation.
Eddie Redmayne, who played Matt Damon's son in "The Good Shepherd," plays an extravagantly blas� young mama's boy swanning around Paris, Majorca and London while his jet-setting parents (Stephen Dillane, Julianne Moore) squabble.
As played from adolescence on by the slim, enigmatic Redmayne (he was Matt Damon's son in "The Good Shepherd"), the character is the sympathetic cipher at the center of "Savage Grace."