Reading “Savage Grace” is like coming upon the aftermath of a terrible car crash.
Watching Tom Kalin’s movie, which features a risky, nuanced performance by Julianne Moore, is like watching the wreck in slowed, sad motion.
Granted, the auto in question is a Bentley.
But the disaster that befell plastics heiress Barbara Baekeland (nee Daly) and son Antony, recounted by Natalie Robins and Steven M.L. Aronson, has queasy yet spellbinding power.
Maverick indie film producer Christine Vachon gave Kalin the book years ago.
“It’s compelling because it has all those classic American tabloid elements,” says Kalin, calling from his Manhattan home. But, he adds, the characters and their class-tinged tale felt “like something from Edith Wharton or Henry James.”
There is also an undeniable link to Greek tragedy running through her story, says Kalin. Many of the book’s interviewees speak of Barbara’s forbidden relationship with her son.
“It is a classic story of the incestuous relationship of a mother and a son,” he says. “Though that’s where the film goes, that’s not all the story was. It started with this sparkly, amazing girl from the wrong side of the tracks in Boston who gets swept into this total life of privilege and how that becomes her undoing.”
Brooks Baekeland was the grandson of Leo Baekeland, inventor of the plastic Bakelite. Barbara Daly was the daughter of Nina and Frank Daly, who killed himself in 1932.
The film begins in New York City, 1946, when Brooks and Barbara’s only child, Tony, is an infant. The marriage shows signs of strain.
Tony seems to be one more thing pushing at the couple. Scion Brooks (Stephen Dillane) is at odds with Barbara’s societal obsessions.
In capturing the former model and starlet’s gestures, enunciation, self-regard, Moore makes a beautiful argument for the ways in which class is its own performance.
The drama ends where the book begins: in a London apartment on an autumn day in 1972. Brooks is long gone. Tony and Barbara’s relationship has contorted into something destructively symbiotic.
Kalin turned his gaze to the queasy-making once before.
His 1992 debut feature, “Swoon” (produced by Vachon), revisited the story of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb.
The movie about the 1924 kidnap and murder of 14-year old Bobby Franks by the two university students was one of the films that ushered in what critic B. Ruby Rich christened “the New Queer Cinema.”
Kalin says it’s an accident of timing that his first and long-hoped-for sophomore feature travels such erotically charged, troubled territory.
He wanted to make a movie about the friendship of rocker Patti Smith and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. He also had a zesty feature about German punk band the Monks in mind. And in the intervening years, he’s directed numerous shorts screened in museums, a documentary on designer Geoffrey Beene, as well as produced critically lauded indies “I Shot Andy Warhol” and “Go Fish.”
” ‘Savage Grace’ just bubbled up in the interim,” he says.
Kalin then adds with unmistakable clarity, “I can say honestly as a filmmaker I can’t imagine making another movie of symbiosis, of sexual obsession at this level.
“It was so wrenching.”
Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com; also on blogs.denverpostcom/madmoviegoer
