by Ginger Voight

Created on: June 21, 2008   Last Updated: March 29, 2010

"Savage Grace" is the dramatization of real life events, that is long on savage and quite short on grace. Though told with poetic reverence, it proves once again that you can wrap a bloody knife in silk, but the stain will always soak through.

Julianne Moore portrays Barbara Daly Baekeland, an unstable beauty who married well above her station in life. It is in this newfound social status her underlying mental illness festers under excess, as well as the lack of accountability.

Julianne's performance is convincing. Even when she smiles there's a darkness underneath. Barbara's charm is nothing but a paper thin veneer covering her psychotic state. She can laugh in one moment and scream profanities the next. Instead of beautiful and compelling, she seems poisonous and dangerous.

This is especially true in the case of her son's character, Antony. The filmmakers make sure we understand that even from a young child, he had an unnaturally intimate relationship with his mother. Eddie Redmayne turns in a chilling performance as the troubled young adult, who indulges in homosexual affairs while maintaining a destructive co-dependence to his mother.

Tony's father, Brook Baekeland, played by Stephen Dillane, remains quite removed from the events that are taking place; an unintentional accomplice who would ultimately end both the lives of Barbara and their son Tony by leaving them to their own devices.

It is a tale of insanity, incest and murder that will prove far too graphic and disturbing for a broad audience.

It's clear from the onset that it's not for the broad audience this film was made. Screenwriter Howard A. Rodman adapts the book written Natalie Robins and Steven M.L. Aronson. He introduces us to these frankly unlikable characters through pretension and overly clever dialogue in scenes that run longer than they truly need to, trying to sow seeds of love and beauty where there clearly was none.

Tom Kalin seems to glory in his own vision as he fails to truly build scene upon scene in this tragic story of wealth and insanity gone unchecked. Instead of a steady, suspenseful climb to a violent end, the filmmakers seem to flounder from scene to scene in a celebration of their own genius to unflinchingly reveal the darkest side of humanity.

This is especially true in the way they dance around the truly uncomfortable nature of the material, lulling their audience into a false sense of security that there is a line they will not cross. They do cross it and through their retelling place more dramatic emphasis on the incestuous act, rather than the murder itself.

Ultimately they spent entirely too much time trying to unravel the silk from the bloody knife. All that remained was stain on our hands, and the inability to truly connect, empathize or sympathize with the characters.

Watch only if you have a strong constitution for the unflinchingly taboo. That it's based on real life events is sad and tragic, of course. But hidden behind the titillating retelling of social class gossip, "Savage Grace" ultimately is a gratuitous sojourn through the depths of depravity.

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