Published on Cinescene.

Plastics

Sometimes reality is not so much stranger than fiction as it is tackier and more like a TV-serial melodrama. That's the truth illustrated in Tom Kalin's polished but limp film now in release about a plastic heir's matricide in London in 1972, Savage Grace.

Adultery, incest, vulgar language--if you're rich enough, or the movie they happen in is glossy enough, are these things all pretty much on a par? Again, this makes you wonder. As in a TV serial, Savage Grace shocks viewers indiscriminately on many levels, sets and costumes remaining impeccable, so we’ll stay tuned, and if not care, at least feel titillated. When you see in the last few scenes what Barbara, the mother, does to Tony, the son, and what Tony then does to Barbara, you’ll probably react, if only by looking away. But acts performed out of boredom on screen may induce the same feeling in viewers, and other more specific emotions are too little in evidence here. Though Tony was judged to have committed his crime in a state of "diminished capacity," his character is more the victim of diminished development, his derangement less fully illustrated than his taste in bespoke tailoring. His father Brooks (Stephen Dellane) is clearly frustrated with his own lack of motivation and his mother Barbara (Julienne Moore) is a pretentious arriviste who used to be a clerk at Filene's department store. But the way they talk is generic. They remain nice-looking--very nice-looking--actors in beautiful costumes. They never quite develop into real people.

Tony Baekeland (Eddie Redmayne, an Old Etonian, in another evil preppy role) is the young decadent great-grandson of Leo Baekeland, whose ur-plastic Bakelite in its heyday was used for everything from atomic bomb casings to Chanel jewelry. Each successive generation after the fortune was made is, predictably, successively idler and more spoiled. Tony, whom we first see in 1946 as a sweet-tempered babe, grows up watching his parents, who are appropriately idle and spoiled--but, alas, not much else--fight and fight and then divorce. When Tony turns out to like boys, his father runs off with his (Tony’s) beautiful Spanish girlfriend, Blanca (Elena Anaya), and his mother (Moore looking younger and changing hair color as the decades roll by) beds her gay escort Sam (Hugh Dancy), who’s already been with Tony. Things are a bit complicated--but in a way not, since it all happens in a bubble of wealth in New York, Paris, Mallorca, and London where everything is easy, baths are leisurely, and no one's badly groomed. I longed for the hand of Patricia Highsmith, and maybe Philip Seymour Hoffman to give things an edge, to show life's messy even when you're loaded.

The movie reproduces the Forties, Fifties, Sixties and early Seventies as movies do, with clothes and hairstyles. It’s hard to believe Barbara would publicly use language quite this vile with Brooks in any of these decades. The writers seem to forget that certain words were not used by polite women till at least the mid-Sixties. Assuming Barbara did address Brooks this way, it's hard to believe he'd have kept her on as long as he did, since he doesn't seem to be under any external pressure to do so. She, evidently, is deranged, but it's not clear why. Certainly little details seem wrong. Barbara’s' mispronunciation of various foreign languages is right for a rich expatriate no doubt, but would the young Tony (Barney Clark, Polanski's Oliver Twist) not know how to pronounce école bilingue if he's studying in one? Living all his life abroad, would he speak such perfect American?

Everything happens, and yet nothing happens. When Tony commits his crime and his voiceover says a great burden has been lifted I hoped Eddie Redmayne would drop his too-perfect American accent, though of course he never does. Redmayne is a coolly controlled actor, a master of the art of seeming to hide emotion; but after doing several uppercrust wrongdoers, maybe he deserves a different kind of role, in a better movie. Dillane, Dancy, and above all Julienne Moore as the enveloping Mummy and verbally abusive wife, all help give this glossy tripe more finish than the daytime soaps. It’s like some downgraded form of Masterpiece Theater, or Ismail Merchant without Ismael or Merchant. But it's still tripe. Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

This is nowhere near as good as Reversal of Fortune, Barbet Schroeder's nuanced and engrossing study of posh wrongdoing. Something may have been lost from the Baekeland story told in Natalie Robins and Steven M. L. Aronson's eponymous book when it got filtered through Howard A. Rodman's adaptation. Best known for his 1992 Swoon about the Leopold and Loeb murders, Kalin reveals an unhealthy taste for gay and lurid true-life stories. His plastic hasn't the resilience of Bakelite.

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See Amond Whit's devastating and analytical NY Press review