Solid acting boosts freak show in a train wreck

OEDIPUS WRECKS: Tony Baekeland (Eddie Redmayne, left) has a gay affair with Jake (Unax Ugalde). Tony will share his next boyfriend with his mom.

Money can’t buy sanity. That’s the message of “Savage Grace,” Tom Kalin’s follow-up (after 15 years!) to “Swoon.” Although “Savage Grace” isn’t as dramatically successful as “Swoon,” Kalin does a great job of depicting wealth on a budget. Here he spans 26 years and four countries in the lives of the Baekeland family, heirs to the Bakelite fortune.

In 1946, Barbara (Julianne Moore) and Brooks Baekeland (Stephen Dillane) have a new infant son, Antony, but they leave him with her mother (Anne Reid) while they go out to the Stork Club. An older Tony narrates, describing his father as “an adventurer … cold and dark” and his mother as “a master of the understated … warm and light.”

Having married into wealth, Barbara is nouveau riche and will spend the rest of her life cultivating friends in high society and trying to fit in. She does a little painting, but mostly these rich people look bored. However, if your mouth opens while watching them, it won’t be to yawn but for your jaw to hit the floor.

As Tony gets older, his bond to his mother grows ever stronger. When he’s an adolescent, (Barney Clark) she asks him with typical inappropriateness, “Will you still love me when my hair is grey and my tits are sagging?”

Naturally, he grows up gay.

In 1967, they’re living in Cadaqués, Spain, where Tony (Eddie Redmayne) has a boyfriend, Jake (Unax Ugalde). He meets Blanca (Elena Anaya), and Barbara pushes him to have sex with her.

The next year, Barbara regrets bringing Blanca into the family — when she catches Brooks with her, and her husband goes off to live with Blanca. Barbara takes up with Sam (Hugh Dancy), a “walker,” described as “a homosexual who escorts wealthy women.” Sam’s not a Kinsey Six because he offers sexual services to Barbara and Tony, individually and together.

There are signs all along of Barbara’s erratic behavior, but Tony appears more even-tempered, not even showing emotion when his mother undresses him and straddles him on their living room couch, then masturbates him when he doesn’t come inside her.

Once it gets moving, “Savage Grace” pretty much jumps from one sexual episode to another without a lot of narrative glue to hold them together. Although the sex is all over the map, Kalin strains to incorporate more gay elements, including a gratuitous question about Proust’s orientation.

Moore is brilliant, of course. But Howard A. Rodman’s script gives her only fragments of a character to work with. Redmayne, who looks like a less pretty Jonathan Rhys Meyers and has the lips to play a young Mick Jagger, is consistently blasé until he finally goes over the edge.

Psychological insights into why things worked out the way they did are left to your imagination, although the average viewer is more likely to wonder what took so long for things to go so wrong.

“Savage Grace” has the watchability factor of a freak show in a train wreck. It gets high marks for cinematography and acting but isn’t good enough to legitimately involve you in the lives of its characters or enough fun to revel in as a guilty pleasure.

	SAVAGE GRACE
C+	Director: Tom Kalin Cast: Julianne Moore, Eddie Redmayne and Unax Ugalde Opens: June 27 at the Angelica Dallas. 1 hr. 37 min.      R

This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition June 27, 2008.