The Baekelands were a socially prominent family of American plutocrats. The patriarch of the clan was Leo Baekeland, a brilliant
Belgian-born scientist and inventor who emigrated to the United States in
1889, when he
was in his mid-twenties, and promptly came up with some patents that would make
him rich and important enough to merit a cover of Time Magazine. His most
important invention was Bakelite, the first truly useful plastic and, as such,
an ubiquitous and profitable product throughout the 20th century.
Long after Leo had departed from our plane of existence, his great-grandson
Antony was incarcerated in England for stabbing his mother to death. After
serving nearly a decade in a mental institution, he moved to New York to live
with his grandmother whereupon, within a few days of his release, he stabbed
her as well. She survived; he went to Riker's Island, where he committed
suicide within a year.
Savage Grace traces the relationship between Antony and his parents, Brooks
and Barbara, from the time of his birth until the fatal knifing. The parents
are established as idle sybarites who seem to know everyone important in the
world, but cannot contribute anything worthwhile to society. Although Brooks
was widely regarded to be an extremely brilliant man, his career consisted of
spending his family's money and posturing as an unpublished writer. Barbara is
pictured as a woman lacking in the intellectual and social graces necessary to
move in the company she and her husband keep. She dotes excessively on her
son, and eventually relates to him incestuously.
As pictured here, Antony's childhood lacks any hint of normality. As a boy,
he is seducing other young boys, to his parents' dismay. (In real life his
mother tried to "cure" him by paying young women to please him, but the film
does not mention that, which is just as well because the scriptwriter already
had too much on his plate.) As a young man, Antony tests his sexuality in a
family environment inimical to experimentation. When Antony brings home a
beautiful Spanish girl, his father soon seduces the girlfriend and almost
immediately runs away with her. When Antony forms a gay relationship with his
mother's "walker," his mother seduces the boyfriend and they soon all end up
in bed together.
The entire film is like one of those Dominic Dunne pieces in Vanity Fair in
which the decadence of the very rich turns eventually into violence, thence
into a media circus trial. The script covers virtually every detail of the
Baekeland's anomie, self-loathing, suicide attempts, and sordid sexual
escapades, but there is no particular insight on display, nor even a point of
view. The film covers 25 years of Antony's life in only 90 minutes of real
running time and is spread so thin as to require great temporal leaps over
critical periods, yet at other times it seems to dwell at excessive length on
scenes which have only minimal relevance to the central thrust of the story.
The lead performers are extremely talented (Julianne Moore and Stephen Dillane),
and the exotic locales look magnificent, but the film seems to have no good
reason to exist, other than to recite the details of the family's moral
bankruptcy in the manner of a docudrama.
It's not a pleasant film to watch. The characters are impossible to like
because they are immodest, pompous, smug, rude, cold, utterly humorless, and have
absolutely no sense of their own fallibility. It's like watching a trailer for
a Jeremy Irons film festival. The film's real problem, however, is not that
the characters are nasty, because they are supposed to be, but that we don't
really know or understand why. When the film was over I felt no sympathy for
the murdered mother, nor compassion for the disturbed child, nor understanding
of the father. I could not understand how the mother and father could have
married in the first place, nor how they could have stayed together as long as
they did. Although it is possible to make assumptions about why Anthony became
disturbed and angry enough to kill his mother, I couldn't see the direct
connection. (The film implies it happened shortly after they had a consensual
sexual encounter. Apparently there were many previous violent incidents
between them which were not pictured.) When the film was over I felt that
there must have been more to the Baekelands than the one-dimensional
characters on display here, and that the script did them a great injustice by
not developing their characters and motivations more fully. I got the sense
that they were interesting enough to make a movie about, but that this was not
that movie.
