by Royce Radcliffe

Created on: June 29, 2008

Savage Grace is the story of Barbara Daly, a woman who married a very wealthy man and had a son. The father virtually disowned the son and as he grew closer to his mother in the upcoming years the seeds for calamity are deeply sewn. The setting ranges from the sixties to seventies and at some point... someone will die.

Please allow me to go off on a small but related tangent here. Savage Grace is yet another movie based on a true story. This does not usually bother me but this is the fourth such movie I have seen in a row! I think it is good to take ideas from the real world but I am also starting to believe that films use this notation to gain instant credibility over other films to the point where it does not even carry any weight anymore. Back when Fargo came out and used this statement as a bold faced lie just to add a sense of realism the jig was up, but instead of giving up films have used the technique ten times more since that seminal film.

Take this film, where enough liberties were taken with the story that anyone who has read anything about the actual case will be able to pick them apart piece by piece. I do not want to go into those semantics here for fear of spoiling the film. Suffice to say reading about the case will certainly lead you to question the validity of some of the film's claims. That said, I am capable of judging a movie apart from its historical accuracy.

This movie follows the marriage of Barbara Daly (Julianne Moore) and Brooks Baekeland (Stephen Dillane), a couple well known around posh London areas, a celebrity couple before the term became popular. They are very elegant and know the acceptable manner of behavios in all the high end clubs they frequent. Despite their exterior perfection they ar enot very loved, at least not in any sense other than a shallow facade. This is an ambitious social statement for the movie to make and even though I have read things stating the opposite I think it was a quality artistic device. During all of this the son is raised like a prince, but due to his parents being always interested in themselves more than him grows detached from his surroundings.

Barbara is a very complicated character and well played by Moore. She obviously has disdain for the aristocracy around her but also in other scenes seems overwhelmed with the desire to please them and gain their approval. The son (Eddie Redmayne, who narrates most of the story) is also a complicated character. His father views him as a failure though he

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