Tom Kalin (2007)

What’s the point of this listless film?  The true life story of the wealthy Baekeland family is too extraordinary to be capable of suggesting anything typical or essential in the relationships of mothers, fathers and only sons – but Barbara Daly Baekeland (a beautiful social climber, who’s married out of her class), her husband Brooks (a scion of the inventor of Bakelite) and their son Tony aren’t interesting, let alone compelling, as individuals.  The voice-over narration is by Tony; it’s obvious from the word go that his relationship with Barbara is going to be pathologically close.  Yet Tom Kalin and the  scenarist Howard A Rodman appear to assume that it’s enough just to reveal the fact of Tony’s bisexuality and eventually incestuous relationship with his mother – if only there was as much penetration in the direction and writing as there is on the screen.  The presentation of the various couplings – and one threesome – is largely pictorial; and the characters seem drawn to each other less by psychological or sexual impulsion than by want of anything better to do – and by the lack of available options.   Most of the possible permutations occur in the course of Savage Grace.  Tony’s girlfriend is Blanca but he prefers boys and pairs up with Jake.  Brooks leaves Barbara and sets up house with Blanca.  Sam, a supposedly homosexual ‘walker’ for Barbara, moves in and seduces Tony – then Barbara, before Tony joins them both in bed.   Finally and fatally, it’s Barbara and Tony.   The film moves from New York in the late forties to Paris in the late fifties to Spain in the late sixties and back to Paris before Tony kills Barbara in a London flat in 1972 (although I was drowsing by this point).   The closing credits tell us that he was found guilty of manslaughter, went to Broadmoor for eight years, returned to the USA in 1980, attempted to murder Barbara’s mother, was put away again, and committed suicide a year later.

Julianne Moore lacks the energy to dramatise the tensions arising from Barbara’s modest background, her husband’s social discomfort with and personal contempt for her clumsy pretensions.   As usual, she’s remarkable to look at but the characterisation is limited:  we understand that the women Moore is playing are unhappy but not much more.   Her motor seems usually to run at the same slow pace; she becomes animated only at moments which are implausibly melodramatic – here, at a lunch party and in a scene at Mallorca airport when Barbara starts yelling purple prose and expletives at her husband and his young Spanish mistress.  Eddie Redmayne’s colouring and cheekbones make him a good physical match with Moore but he’s vacuous as Tony – as if the character’s helplessness justified sleepwalking through the part.   In the overdone opening scenes in New York, Stephen Dillane telegraphs his feelings about Barbara and her mother.  But Dillane’s a good actor and, once the action moves to Europe, his combination of tensile strength and the way he seems to shrink physically in avoiding suffocating life with Barbara makes for the best performance in the film.  It’s impossible to understand, however, how their marriage has lasted so long; if it’s a mutually satisfying sex life that transcends their other incompatibilities, there’s no sign of this.    Hugh Dancy gives a not surprisingly uncertain performance as the walker-mentor-bedfellow.  Others have more success in smaller parts – not least because they’re relatively believable human beings – including Elena Anaya as Blanca, Belén Rueda as the wife of one of Brooks’s Spanish friends, and, especially, Anne Reid as Barbara’s mother.   The closing credits are very hard to read:  this may be either smart thinking or a final example at artiness that ends up being as uncommunicative as most of what’s preceded it.

14 September 2008