Savage Grace
Directed by Tom Kalin
Is Julianne Moore the queen of fraudulent gay cinema? She’s muse to misogynist gay male directors from Steven Daldry (The Hours) to Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven) who poise her as castrating monsters. Now Moore plays a woman who is the target of her gay son’s frustrations in Tom Kalin’s Savage Grace—the story of Barbara Baekeland, the unbalanced wealthy socialite who led her son to incest and murder in 1972. It’s Moore’s own actressy egotism that causes her to embrace these roles without transforming them; she ignores the everyday truths of unhappy women who perplex gay men and then hides empathy behind humorless grotesque behavior: Barbara dopes herself with Hexadrine, a suppository sedative.
After unbuttoning her adult son’s pants, she pauses, saying, “Hold that thought.” But Moore’s dry wit is only half her artistic obligation; she conveys sarcasm, not sorrow, when Barbara publicly screams at her husband’s mistress, “Does he fuck you up the ass? He thinks it’s very manly. I think it’s quite the opposite!”
Those snarky outrages are part of the confused gay-academic agenda Kalin shares with Haynes. Both are so far removed from the genuine sacrifices of gay liberation that they wind up celebrating pathologies—but Kalin has a trashier sense of what’s profound. He uses beach-fiction plots—involving wealthy playboy types, psychopaths and murder mysteries—to dramatize gender-studies issues. For extra credit, Kalin doesn’t think up these stories himself, but extrapolates from true-life crime legends. His first film, Swoon, glamorized the 1927 Leopold-Loeb killing spree just as, for Savage Grace, Kalin performs a Dynasty makeover on the Baekeland matricide.
Neither savage nor graceful, Savage Grace’s creaky—and creepy—tale of mother-son incest doesn’t get the art-film benefit-of-the-doubt that led critics to acclaim Swoon. Everyone’s forgotten that early ‘90s “New Queer Cinema” fad, so Kalin’s post-grad narrative deconstruction is exposed as stultifying soap opera. He films a swanky dinner-party-gone-bad as barking declamations rather than a moment of class tension and personal fury. Kalin doesn’t know how to emotionalize a scene; his actors merely make points: Moore as trophy wife Barbara telegraphs hostility, perversity and coldness. Stephane Dillane as her husband Brooks, a manufacturing empire scion, signals effete indifference to both his wife and child. Their son, Antony (Eddie Redmayne) mimes androgynous pathology, flaunting over-education and sexual precocity.
It’s the academic approach to family drama (reducing it to social and psychological analysis) that prevents Savage Grace from being convincing or enjoyable. Though tonier than Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, this unsavory dysfunctional family story doesn’t convey personal tragedy; half of it is poststructuralist titillation. Like Swoon it’s also nutty special pleading for a twisted young man’s (irrelevant) gay identity. Here’s Kalin’s m.o.: Camp-up real-life misery (distanced by time); emphasize its glossy, glamorous surface (the Baekeland globetrotting lifestyle in the European art world); then beg pity for its chilly, unlikable snobs.
Savage Grace surveys events from Tony’s privileged birth and miseducation (mastering several languages, reading Georges Bataille’s Justine) that lead up to rejection by his father and seduction by his mother. Even his girlfriend’s infidelity and his own dalliance with his mother’s male escort are just rehearsals for committing the ultimate taboo. Yet, Kalin’s 26-year story arc gives no sense of an outside world where sexual revolution was creating a foundation for queerness. Instead, Kalin heroicizes Tony’s post-Stonewall act of homicide through supplicating letters to his rich father: “You ask what’s it like to be in prison? Exactly as one would imagine.” It’s the weirdest-ever sentimentalization of being psychologically closeted.
Tony luxuriates in his wealth and, eventually, murders as a function of his privilege. (A wordy epilogue informs us of Tony’s pathetic fate—or else Kalin might go on for another hour.) Seeking sympathy for Tony’s “martyrdom” (like Leopold and Loeb’s) is a highbrow version of the self-pitying narratives now proliferating in the worst gay-themed movies. Tony’s mother-fixation recalls the damaged, hateful protagonist of Running with Scissors, his vengeful acting-out resembles the young masochists of Mysterious Skin. A veritable plague of characters who can’t explicate their own sexuality are exploited by directors not any more articulate. These films display a perverse romance with pathology. Tony pleads, “Sometimes I have a bloody mind and I don’t know what to do about it.” Then, when contemplating incest, he whines, “For years I have been living a totally false life. I’ve decided to make a totally new person of myself.” Kalin seems clueless about depicting Tony’s utter confusion except to dare it as—academic buzzword—“transgression.”
Without a sense of sensuality or sin, this approach is merely theoretical—typified by Tony’s drug-dealing lover who quotes: “Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.” (That’s from William Burroughs’ mentor, Brion Gysin, bowdlerizing Dostoyevsky.) Similarly, Savage Grace shows Kalin’s misjudged attempt at matching a queer artifact like Paul Bowles’ classic short story “Pages from Cold Point”; and he fails, only partly due to poor film craft. Kalin elides crucial info (Tony’s first sexual foray, Barbara’s slumming fling with a Spanish cab driver). Even the murder scene is clumsily directed—the killer is out of focus and the act’s motivation is unclear and matter-of-factly performed. (Seeing Brian De Palma at the press screening suggested that this film could have had a more serious, sane temper.)
Kalin’s moviemaking is bland and repugnant—a lot like Redmayne’s characterization. But Tony’s such a limp protagonist that, strangely, the brunt of Savage Grace’s catastrophe falls on Moore. Like Nicole Kidman, she’ll do anything that sounds “artistic.” During Barbara’s dinner-party snit, she preposterously taunts, “Was Proust truly a homosexual?” The question goes unanswered. Kalin simply wants to nudge us about gay sensibility while offering none of the sensitivity. One recalls that Bertolucci handled mother-son incest in Luna (1979) as part of an elaborate cultural metaphor and did it with psychological tact. Tennessee Williams certainly knew how to sympathize with female plight as a symbol for all emotional repression, but Kalin uses Moore to exact an old-fashioned, Ivory-Closet revenge: Blame Mommy.
With Kalin’s unsensual, anti-passionate, rhythm-less technique, queer cinema is set back before Stonewall—even before Broken Blossoms, Now Voyager, Visconti’s Senso, Minnelli’s Tea and Sympathy and Altman’s Come Back to the Five and Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. Ironically, this results from Kalin’s shallow cultural politics. Tony laments his grandfather’s credo, “One of the uses of money is that it allows us to live without the consequences of our mistakes.” But that’s exactly how Kalin abuses the privilege of beach-novel moviemaking and the lofty radicalism of gay studies. Obsessed with the axis of queerness, money and murder, Kalin makes guilty-pleasure flicks for academics.
Directed by Tom Kalin
Is Julianne Moore the queen of fraudulent gay cinema? She’s muse to misogynist gay male directors from Steven Daldry (The Hours) to Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven) who poise her as castrating monsters. Now Moore plays a woman who is the target of her gay son’s frustrations in Tom Kalin’s Savage Grace—the story of Barbara Baekeland, the unbalanced wealthy socialite who led her son to incest and murder in 1972. It’s Moore’s own actressy egotism that causes her to embrace these roles without transforming them; she ignores the everyday truths of unhappy women who perplex gay men and then hides empathy behind humorless grotesque behavior: Barbara dopes herself with Hexadrine, a suppository sedative.
After unbuttoning her adult son’s pants, she pauses, saying, “Hold that thought.” But Moore’s dry wit is only half her artistic obligation; she conveys sarcasm, not sorrow, when Barbara publicly screams at her husband’s mistress, “Does he fuck you up the ass? He thinks it’s very manly. I think it’s quite the opposite!”
Those snarky outrages are part of the confused gay-academic agenda Kalin shares with Haynes. Both are so far removed from the genuine sacrifices of gay liberation that they wind up celebrating pathologies—but Kalin has a trashier sense of what’s profound. He uses beach-fiction plots—involving wealthy playboy types, psychopaths and murder mysteries—to dramatize gender-studies issues. For extra credit, Kalin doesn’t think up these stories himself, but extrapolates from true-life crime legends. His first film, Swoon, glamorized the 1927 Leopold-Loeb killing spree just as, for Savage Grace, Kalin performs a Dynasty makeover on the Baekeland matricide.
Neither savage nor graceful, Savage Grace’s creaky—and creepy—tale of mother-son incest doesn’t get the art-film benefit-of-the-doubt that led critics to acclaim Swoon. Everyone’s forgotten that early ‘90s “New Queer Cinema” fad, so Kalin’s post-grad narrative deconstruction is exposed as stultifying soap opera. He films a swanky dinner-party-gone-bad as barking declamations rather than a moment of class tension and personal fury. Kalin doesn’t know how to emotionalize a scene; his actors merely make points: Moore as trophy wife Barbara telegraphs hostility, perversity and coldness. Stephane Dillane as her husband Brooks, a manufacturing empire scion, signals effete indifference to both his wife and child. Their son, Antony (Eddie Redmayne) mimes androgynous pathology, flaunting over-education and sexual precocity.
It’s the academic approach to family drama (reducing it to social and psychological analysis) that prevents Savage Grace from being convincing or enjoyable. Though tonier than Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, this unsavory dysfunctional family story doesn’t convey personal tragedy; half of it is poststructuralist titillation. Like Swoon it’s also nutty special pleading for a twisted young man’s (irrelevant) gay identity. Here’s Kalin’s m.o.: Camp-up real-life misery (distanced by time); emphasize its glossy, glamorous surface (the Baekeland globetrotting lifestyle in the European art world); then beg pity for its chilly, unlikable snobs.
Savage Grace surveys events from Tony’s privileged birth and miseducation (mastering several languages, reading Georges Bataille’s Justine) that lead up to rejection by his father and seduction by his mother. Even his girlfriend’s infidelity and his own dalliance with his mother’s male escort are just rehearsals for committing the ultimate taboo. Yet, Kalin’s 26-year story arc gives no sense of an outside world where sexual revolution was creating a foundation for queerness. Instead, Kalin heroicizes Tony’s post-Stonewall act of homicide through supplicating letters to his rich father: “You ask what’s it like to be in prison? Exactly as one would imagine.” It’s the weirdest-ever sentimentalization of being psychologically closeted.
Tony luxuriates in his wealth and, eventually, murders as a function of his privilege. (A wordy epilogue informs us of Tony’s pathetic fate—or else Kalin might go on for another hour.) Seeking sympathy for Tony’s “martyrdom” (like Leopold and Loeb’s) is a highbrow version of the self-pitying narratives now proliferating in the worst gay-themed movies. Tony’s mother-fixation recalls the damaged, hateful protagonist of Running with Scissors, his vengeful acting-out resembles the young masochists of Mysterious Skin. A veritable plague of characters who can’t explicate their own sexuality are exploited by directors not any more articulate. These films display a perverse romance with pathology. Tony pleads, “Sometimes I have a bloody mind and I don’t know what to do about it.” Then, when contemplating incest, he whines, “For years I have been living a totally false life. I’ve decided to make a totally new person of myself.” Kalin seems clueless about depicting Tony’s utter confusion except to dare it as—academic buzzword—“transgression.”
Without a sense of sensuality or sin, this approach is merely theoretical—typified by Tony’s drug-dealing lover who quotes: “Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.” (That’s from William Burroughs’ mentor, Brion Gysin, bowdlerizing Dostoyevsky.) Similarly, Savage Grace shows Kalin’s misjudged attempt at matching a queer artifact like Paul Bowles’ classic short story “Pages from Cold Point”; and he fails, only partly due to poor film craft. Kalin elides crucial info (Tony’s first sexual foray, Barbara’s slumming fling with a Spanish cab driver). Even the murder scene is clumsily directed—the killer is out of focus and the act’s motivation is unclear and matter-of-factly performed. (Seeing Brian De Palma at the press screening suggested that this film could have had a more serious, sane temper.)
Kalin’s moviemaking is bland and repugnant—a lot like Redmayne’s characterization. But Tony’s such a limp protagonist that, strangely, the brunt of Savage Grace’s catastrophe falls on Moore. Like Nicole Kidman, she’ll do anything that sounds “artistic.” During Barbara’s dinner-party snit, she preposterously taunts, “Was Proust truly a homosexual?” The question goes unanswered. Kalin simply wants to nudge us about gay sensibility while offering none of the sensitivity. One recalls that Bertolucci handled mother-son incest in Luna (1979) as part of an elaborate cultural metaphor and did it with psychological tact. Tennessee Williams certainly knew how to sympathize with female plight as a symbol for all emotional repression, but Kalin uses Moore to exact an old-fashioned, Ivory-Closet revenge: Blame Mommy.
With Kalin’s unsensual, anti-passionate, rhythm-less technique, queer cinema is set back before Stonewall—even before Broken Blossoms, Now Voyager, Visconti’s Senso, Minnelli’s Tea and Sympathy and Altman’s Come Back to the Five and Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. Ironically, this results from Kalin’s shallow cultural politics. Tony laments his grandfather’s credo, “One of the uses of money is that it allows us to live without the consequences of our mistakes.” But that’s exactly how Kalin abuses the privilege of beach-novel moviemaking and the lofty radicalism of gay studies. Obsessed with the axis of queerness, money and murder, Kalin makes guilty-pleasure flicks for academics.
