Savage Grace

Finally a movie that answers the question on all our minds: when Julianne Moore gives her son a hand job which hand does she use? (It’s the left one). It took Tom Kalin fifteen years to follow up Swoon w/ another feature. Worth the wait? You betcha! While the earlier b&w Leoplod and Loeb movie remains a classic both of New Queer cinema and the early nineties boom in American indie production generally, this new pic, a much slighter affair, depicts a no less abject true story from out of the past, rich in art directed bric-a-brac. It is really about two things: the private (terminal hubristic merger between mother and son w/ too much time and old-money-by-proxy on their hands) and public/political (the terminal hubristic transitions from the Tupperware 1950s to the post-’68 world of who’s kidding who?). Our new suicidal epoch is ushered in by Moore’s icily testicle-shrinking Barbara Bakeland slitting her wrists in Paris while the students hurtle their Molotov May specials. The Bakelands are a sick bunch, heir to the Bakelite fortune (which made the fission of the fat man and little boy palatable for Japanese export, their empire having grown exponentially in the thirties while everyone else lined up for bread), chainsmoking their way to the inevitable return of baby-boy Hamlet’s repressed, brought on by a transitional object (the collar of a dead dog), which he cradles while sucking his thumb on the kitchen floor, a dropped egg of a human being. Hamlet has absorbed his own phantom uncle in the womb and things will not be pretty. It’s hard to take yr eyes off Eddie Redmayne, especially as you begin to fear the worst; his is a name to watch. Let’s just say that one shouldn’t seclude Linus without the blankie. Not ever! All the kink and bleakness is handled w/ the care of Joseph Losey at his late period best. His masterful Accident does similarly vicious (yet even-handed and tempered) work w/ tabloid material. The real precedent, however, is most definitely Le soufflé au cour – probably my favorite Louis Malle – if that film’s bubbly tone were replaced w/ a kitchen knife in the gut. In fact, Redmayne even looks like Benoît Ferreux. It all collapses all to believably, true stories having that tendency every so often. See it! and be sure to invite mommy and grandmommy especially if you want to scare the living shit out of them!