"It’s the academic approach to family drama (reducing it to social and
psychological analysis) that prevents Savage Grace from being convincing or
enjoyable. Though tonier than Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows
You’re Dead, this unsavory dysfunctional family story doesn’t
convey personal tragedy; half of it is poststructuralist titillation. Like
Swoon it’s also nutty special pleading for a twisted young
man’s (irrelevant) gay identity. Here’s Kalin’s m.o.:
Camp-up real-life misery (distanced by time); emphasize its glossy,
glamorous surface (the Baekeland globetrotting lifestyle in the European
art world); then beg pity for its chilly, unlikable snobs.
Savage Grace surveys events from Tony’s privileged birth and miseducation (mastering several languages, reading Georges Bataille’s Justine) that lead up to rejection by his father and seduction by his mother. Even his girlfriend’s infidelity and his own dalliance with his mother’s male escort are just rehearsals for committing the ultimate taboo. Yet, Kalin’s 26-year story arc gives no sense of an outside world where sexual revolution was creating a foundation for queerness. Instead, Kalin heroicizes Tony’s post-Stonewall act of homicide through supplicating letters to his rich father: “You ask what’s it like to be in prison? Exactly as one would imagine.” It’s the weirdest-ever sentimentalization of being psychologically closeted.
Kalin’s moviemaking is bland and repugnant—a lot like Redmayne’s characterization. But Tony’s such a limp protagonist that, strangely, the brunt of Savage Grace’s catastrophe falls on Moore. Like Nicole Kidman, she’ll do anything that sounds “artistic.” During Barbara’s dinner-party snit, she preposterously taunts, “Was Proust truly a homosexual?” The question goes unanswered. Kalin simply wants to nudge us about gay sensibility while offering none of the sensitivity. One recalls that Bertolucci handled mother-son incest in Luna (1979) as part of an elaborate cultural metaphor and did it with psychological tact. Tennessee Williams certainly knew how to sympathize with female plight as a symbol for all emotional repression, but Kalin uses Moore to exact an old-fashioned, Ivory-Closet revenge: Blame Mommy.