“One of the uses of money is that it allows us not to live with the consequences of our mistakes.” Those words, attributed to plastics millionaire Leo Baekeland and spoken by his grandson Brooks, hang over Savage Grace like a warning from the gods.
#Eddie redmayne in savage grace movie
I reviewed the movie for the Philadelphia City Paper at the time, and since a redesign killed the original link, I’m reproducing that review here as well.
#Eddie redmayne in savage grace plus
She schools young Tony in French while her own attempts at mastering a series of second languages fall flat, and eventually fails so decisively at convincing the outside world of her Continental sophistication that she turns inward instead.Īlthough it wasn’t available anywhere except on DVD last fall when Moore’s and Redmayne’s names first began to circulate in the awards conversation, the film’s distributor has since wised up and made it available for streaming, free on Hulu Plus and for rental via Amazon, iTunes and Sundance Now. Scott said said the characters seemed “vague, stilted and unreal.” The latter seems precisely the point: As Moore plays Barbara Baekeland - in a mode not too far removed from her performances in Todd Haynes’ “Safe” and “Far From Heaven” - she’s a brittle high-society poseur trying to live down the tragic error of marrying into a fortune that’s all but evaporated. Variety’s Jay Weisberg targeted the film’s “maddeningly over-arch dialogue and struggles with characterization,” while in the New York Times, A.O. This seemed to confuse quite a few critics, many of whom were in any case not-so-subtly squicked out by “Savage Grace’s” subject matter. But where “Swoon” treated its subject with a dreamy remove, “Savage Grace” adopted a visual style that was more overtly naturalistic, the unfiltered light of Mediterranean villas contrasting pointedly with Redmayne’s and especially Moore’s stylized performances. Tom Kalin’s 2007 “Savage Grace,” his first feature since 1992’s “Swoon,” was a much-anticipated return from the creator of one of the pillars of the New Queer Cinema, but that anticipation turned to disappointment and frank dislike when critics got a look at the film, which tells the story of the incestuous, and eventually murderous, relationship between Bakelite fortune heir Antony Baekeland (Redmayne) and his mother, Barbara (Moore).Īs he did with “Swoon,” which focused on the same Leopold and Loeb murders that inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rope,” Kalin took an irresistably lurid story and approached it with heady aesthetic distance. Eddie Redmayne, who won Best Actor for “ The Theory of Everything,” has certainly done worse than his sensitive and soulful portrayal of the young Stephen Hawking, but it’s hard to suppress the suspicions that the Academy is less interested in the nuances of his work than its ostentatious physical transformation.įortunately, you can see both Moore and Redmayne at their best in the same movie, and reappraise a great and wrongly maligned work while you’re at it. Moore’s performance isn’t a travesty of her own talent, like Al Pacino’s in “Scent of a Woman,” but she’s been given more to work with in dozens in better films. Although no one can fault the Academy’s decision to bestow a Best Actress Oscar on Julianne Moore, her win for “ Still Alice” continues the long tradition of rewarding the right actors for the wrong movie.
0 kommentar(er)
