InsaneJournal

savage grace

Saturday night, I went to the movies.  Given my obsession with Tim Roth and my love of comic books (not to mention a long time interest in Ed Norton’s work) it probably seems like I’d want to see The Incredible Hulk but I honestly don’t have any desire to see it.  On the other hand I was very excited to see Tom Kalin’s Savage Grace.  Kalin directed Swoon, one of my favorite movies, in 1992 but hasn’t done a full length film since then so in my world the opening of Savage Grace was a big deal. 

Like Swoon, which dealt with the Leopold and Loeb murder, Savage Grace is based on an actual case—the 1972 murder of socialite Barbara Baekeland by her son Tony.  Barbara (Julianne Moore) is married to Brooks Baekeland (Stephen Dillane) whose family earned a fortune from the invention of bakelite plastics.  Their marriage is deeply troubled.  Brooks is discontented with the sort of pretentious, upper-crust social circles that Barbara obsessively courts.  From the beginning, Barbara seems dangerously unstable or even mentally ill.  She puts a great deal of work into being accepted by high society then sabotages her own efforts with inappropriate outbursts—in one scene she begins as a doting hostess and ends up denouncing her guests. 

Barbara’s behavior alarms and exasperates her husband but Barbara creates an unwavering and worshipful ally in her son Tony (played by Eddie Redmayne as an adult).  Which works very well when Tony is a precocious child but gets much more complicated when Tony becomes a sexually confused adult and Barbara and Brooks’ marriage dissolves. 

It’s quite an amazing little film, darkly comic and profoundly disturbing.  Anyone who’s read my fiction knows I have a sort of twisted fascination with the idea of incest as a trope for the way family members use and misuse each other.  Savage Grace brought these ideas chillingly to life.  Barbara refuses to allow the appropriate boundaries between herself and her son and a horrible interdependence grows between them that leads first to the scariest threesome on film (suddenly the brother and sister in The Dreamers seem vaguely wholesome) to an outright sexual act between mother and son that was frankly, shocking (people in the theater, including me, we literally gasping).  I knew there was incest in the film but by the time Barbara mounts her son he seems so emotionally damaged that it seems like an act of deliberately, selfish and nearly violent cruelty on her part. 

Really chilling, and yet despite all the implicit emotional violence part of me thought it was a really cool scene in the sense that I don’t think I’ve ever seen a woman being that aggressive or that much in charge during a sex scene before, at least not in an American film.  It’s sort of a shame (but not really a surprise) that the rare sexually dominate woman (or femme seme as I like to say) is a bit of a monster.