Eddie redmayne savage grace
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Their vacuous lives and deep betrayals in the hothouse world where there is nothing to do but spend money and seek intimacy wherever you can find it do not stir the emotions – It’s hard to like or even sympathise with this lot, but at first you are fascinated all the same, as father-son, husband-wife relations are non-existent and mother-son relations warp and evolve into something unspeakable.Ī disconnectedness which may be intended but ultimately irritates takes the sting away from much of the middle section where we see the family being bored and in the case of Barbara boorish around gorgeous bits of Europe, as the increasingly disturbed Tony, established in a somewhat clichéed manner as gay from early on, tries out an unlikely heterosexual relationship which is stolen from him by his smooth talking father, and moves on to a three in a bed with his mother and her camp ‘escort’ (Hugh Dancy). Stephen Dillane is icily precise as purposeless, cold-hearted Brookes Baekerland, while Eddie Redmayne as their son, perfect casting for Moore’s offspring, maintains an vulnerable but unknowable weirdness. A suffocating but perversely delicious atmosphere pervades the start, as Moore’s odd, upper-class speech and languorous ways gradually reveal a soul ill at ease when at its most apparently confident, detached at its most sensual. Julianne Moore once more shows how very very good she is at presenting the calm bourgeois face on a simmering emotional turmoil beneath, not to mention how very very authentic she looks in Fifties clothes, as Barbara Daly Baekerland, social-climbing wife of the heir to the Bakelite fortune.Īdmirers of Tom Karlin (important figure in the American ‘New Queer Cinema’) have had to wait 15 years since his last feature, Swoon, also based on a scandalous, decadent crime, the Leopold/Loeb murder (also the basis for Hitchcock’s Rope).
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Julianne Moore rarely gives a below-par performance in anything and she's convincingly volatile here too, but even she can't quite manage to bring this complex, doomed woman to life.As Eddie Redmayne’s performances travel increasingly down the ‘nice vulnerable dotty guy’ route, it’s worth remembering he could do complex and sinister so well in his early days. SAVAGE GRACE (2008) by Tom Kalin was one such instance.Īs glossy and disturbing as a painted fingernail scraping down a polished surface, this beautiful and unrelenting film looks at the life of one super-rich American family which became notorious in 1972 when the disturbed son Tony stabbed his mother to death in their London flat. But it's a strangely lifeless affair and not just because of the suffocating ennui and irritating blankness of the central characters. The film spans the period from 1948 until 1972 and traverses the globe in its six-act structure, following this spectacularly dysfunctional family around the playgrounds of the rich and feckless.
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But their relationship has a tragic and violent end. The notable exception was her son Tony, who she doted on as a baby and had a perverse sexual relationship with as he grew older. Instead of the Leopold and Loeb murder, though, Savage Grace takes a beady look at the strange but true tale of Barbara and Brooks Baekeland, played by Moore and Dillane, and their gay son Tony (Redmayne).īrooks was the dashing heir to the Bakelite plastics fortune, based on his grandfather's patent on the material that was used in everything, from jewellery to nuclear bombs, while she was a brittle and obsessive beauty who married above her class and seemed to despise everyone and everything around her. TOM Kalin's first directorial effort since Swoon 15 years ago once more looks at decadence and murder within the enclaves of the terminally bored and terribly rich. Julianne Moore, Stephen Dillane, Eddie Redmayne.