Fitzgerald was right – the very rich are different from you and me.
Julianne Moore is the wife of the heir to a vast plastics fortune whose life tumbles into tragedy in "Savage Grace."
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And much more so than Hemingway's rehearsed rejoinder (“Yes, they have more money”) would pretend. They have, as Fitzgerald wrote, different weaknesses, different suspicions. And when they fracture, it is in different ways.
But that doesn't mean the very rich are more interesting than you and me.
“Savage Grace,” though – a movie that misquotes Hemingway and Fitzgerald on another subject, in passing – doesn't agree. It finds the very rich – or at least the very rich Baekeland family – unbearably magnetic. But that's because it confuses vulgarity with tragedy, perversion with transgression.
And like the millionaires it chronicles, it's not nearly as interesting as it believes.
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“Savage Grace”
Rating: Not rated
When: Opens tomorrow
Running time: 1 hr., 37 min.
 ½
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Based on a true story, the film begins in the late 1940s as the story of Brooks Baekeland, heir to the Bakelite plastics empire, and Barbara, his shallow wife. They go to parties; they engage in small insults and mildly dirty table talk; they alternately ignore and obsess over their son, Antony.
Director Tom Kalin – whose last film was the arty Leopold-and-Loeb story “Swoon” in 1992 – films all of this with the awe-struck adoration of a decorator, his camera lingering on the furnishings. But who are the people in this velveteen display window? Just mannequins: the dilettantish heir, the gold-digger made good.
What follows – senseless adulteries, European wanderings – is no more compelling. But then Antony begins to grow up. And his mother's education of him – quizzing him on her figure, watching him in his bath, giving him de Sade to read – suggests that he's being groomed to take his father's place, not on the board, but in bed.
This is all fascinating to a child psychologist, perhaps – or an ancient Greek dramatist – but the movie fails to make it believable. There's no sign of either character even acknowledging this timeless taboo (or of Antony's schizophrenia). Instead, the movie twists it into just another act of obsessive love – and then shamefully suggests the child bore as much responsibility for it as the parent.
It might help if the actors were stronger – and as Barbara Baekeland, Julianne Moore is, as always, very good – but the Baekeland men are dull and colorless. As Brooks, Stephen Dillane does little but sport a patchy moustache and look bored; as the older Antony, Eddie Redmayne pouts, unprettily, and works hard to keep the bedsheets pulled up high.
And while Moore is much better, it's not a good part for her, or a good project. Although she wears the period clothes well – she's one of the few modern actresses who can strike that 1940s look effortlessly – there's been no attention to her hair and makeup; she looks precisely as old 25 years into the story as she did at the beginning.
More importantly – fatally – her character stays nearly as static. Although she gets her actressy moments – particularly a public dressing-down of her philandering husband – there's no sense of a person slipping deeper into a moral whirlpool. One year, she's doting on her son; the next year, she's bedding him. And no one could be quite so extraordinarily self-deluded and self-obsessed that they didn't see a difference.
Not even the very, very rich.
