by Philo Gabriel

Created on: November 19, 2009   Last Updated: September 10, 2010

2007's "Savage Grace" from director Tom Kalin is based on a pretty bizarre true story about the heirs to the Bakelite plastics fortune: Husband Brooks Baekeland (Stephen Dillane), wife Barbara Daly Baekeland (Julianne Moore), and their only child, son Tony (Eddie Redmayne).

It certainly has the potential to be interesting, at least on a tabloid level, as it has actual or implied murder, suicide, homosexuality, incest, threesomes, schizophrenia, and all kinds of fun stuff.

But somehow it manages to be quite boring, especially early. It turns out all that sensationalist material is in the second half of the movie. Certainly for the first twenty minutes, and to some extent for the first hour, this is one of the dullest films I've seen in memory, and it was a real struggle focusing on it at all.

For one thing, the characters are uniformly unsympathetic. So for much of the movie, we're watching a soap opera in slow motion about unappealing rich people who smoke incessantly.

The former model and wannabe actress Barbara is a repellent, batty, boozy social climber. The cynical, sarcastic Brooks treats her with understandable contempt (though what's not understandable in that case is why he married her in the first place), and eventually skips out. Tony is an arrogant, prissy homosexual. Rarely do any of them show any sign of being a humane, intelligent, or interesting person, or capable of any but the most dysfunctional human relationships.

Then toward the end the relationship between the mother and son gets even weirder, culminating in murder and all the aforementioned bizarre material. Except by that time I really wasn't even shocked by any of it. Maybe because I was still too bored from earlier, maybe because I never cared about or took an interest in these characters anyway, or maybe due to the movie doing a poor job presenting these events.

And then in later reading up on the historical facts behind this movie, I discovered that most of the wildest stuff has never been confirmed anyway, and may well be lies or delusions.

But without the titillation or shock value, there's really not much left to recommend this movie. I don't see any other reason for it to exist, or anything else that can be gained by watching it. So for me at least, it fails to make good on its one (dubious) claim to interest, therefore this one gets a clear thumbs down from me.

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