Julianne Moore in Savage Grace: the mother of all scandals
It's taboo, but it's true. Tom Kalin has made a challenging film about
the life and savage death of an American socialite
By Stephen Dalton

If Tom Kalin's latest film was fictional, it might easily be dismissed
as lurid melodrama. But Savage Grace is a true story of privilege, sex
and murder that combines the overheated camp of soap opera with the
toxic family tragedy of a Tennessee Williams play. Proof that truth is
sometimes not just stranger than fiction but considerably darker too.

Based on a cult book by Natalie Robins and Steven Aronson, Savage
Grace traces the dramatic rise and fall of Barbara Daly Baekeland,
wife of Brooks Baekeland, dissolute heir to the Bakelite plastics
fortune. Barbara, played superbly by Julianne Moore, was an unstable,
suicidally depressed social climber with rapacious, transgressive
sexual appetites.

The film concentrates on her incestuous relationship with her son
Antony, played by Eddie Redmayne, who finally took grisly revenge on
his mother in November 1972. “That oedipal bond between the two of
them is what made the film attractive in the first place,” Kalin says.
“It was sensational, shocking, true-life material, but it also had the
resonance of Greek tragedy.”

The film's mother-and-son sex scenes have raised a few eyebrows.
Especially their remarkable final coupling, brutally cold and
remorselessly drawn out, which propels the story towards its bloody
end. “I've had some quite intense reactions,” the 46-year-old director
admits: “‘Why the hell are you putting it on screen for this long?'
Because I think it's necessary dramatically, to get to that place
where you see what's going on between the characters. The detachment
of intimacy. He's all strung out, chain smoking, when she comes home.
It's sort of lion taming. She calms him down by having sex with him.”

This scene is partly speculative, but grounded in ample evidence of an
incestuous relationship. “Barbara certainly told people she was
sleeping with Tony to cure him of his homosexuality,” Kalin says. “I
find that way too facile an explanation.”

On one level Kalin intends us to empathise with Barbara, despite her
monstrous and abusive narcissism. A failed movie star with a family
history of suicide and depression, she married into money. “There were
limited roles for women in that time,” Kalin says. “I joke somewhat
when I say this, but Barbara would have been Madonna had she been born
in a different time.”

Like Swoon, Kalin's first feature, Savage Grace takes a scalpel to the
sadism and arrogance of America's upper classes. This is coincidence,
he insists, although his own relatively humble background helps to
explain his personal empathy with Barbara's social insecurity.

The youngest of 11 children, Kalin was born in Illinois. His Irish
Catholic family had limited money but a high regard for culture and
education. “I grew up hugely aware of class,” he says. “It's the
elephant in the room of American society.” With six brothers, Kalin's
family was a “relatively butch environment”. He is homosexual but he
says that his family is supportive. “I've been involved with the same
person for 15 years. He's a part of their life, so I've been really
lucky.”

Kalin's elegantly subversive Swoon, released in 1992, revisited the
notorious case of the gay lovers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who
killed a child in 1924. It earned him a place in the so-called New
Queer Cinema movement alongside Todd Haynes and Gregg Araki -
directors whose work challenged coy gay stereotypes with knowingly
ironic, often confrontational attitude.

Kalin came to film-making from the Aids activist groups Gran Fury and
Act Up, where he met Haynes. But he argues that New Queer Cinema was
largely a short-lived media invention, necessary at the time but not
today. “Homosexuality in popular culture is not the shocking or rare
thing it was in late Eighties and early Nineties,” he shrugs. “For
good or bad, nowadays we have situation comedies where gays are ‘just
like everybody else', ha! But I don't know if that's progress, that
desexed, middle-class, collie-in-the-back-of-the-station-wagon
representation.”

Savage Grace is released on July 11

Copyright 2008 "The Times"

Jaime