Plastic People of 'Savage Grace' Are the Truly Filthy Rich

Decadence should be more fun than it is in "Savage Grace," Tom Kalin's star-driven account of a notorious 1972 matricide among the idle rich.

Remember what delight was had by all in "White Mischief," another account of genuinely bad behavior among snobs (the British hunting class in Kenya's Happy Valley in the '30s), featuring adultery, murder and taxidermy? What about Claus von Bülow's witty irony in "Reversal of Fortune," in which the bloodless Jeremy Irons portrayed the Danish aristo's sang-froid as almost a parody of the Prince of Decadence, George Sanders?

To me at least, the one responsibility of life's lucky lottery winners is to destroy themselves with mad abandon to provide us more silent sufferers with chuckles at the breakfast table. It seems quite fair, doesn't it?

But in "Savage Grace," the tragic, loaded Baekelands are hardly witty, beautiful or graceful; instead, they boast among their attributes a relentless charmlessness and epic moroseness, and they don't look that good in the linen pants that seem to have been the rage then. They sort of traipse around European watering holes drinking champagne, sending thank-you notes (big among aristos) and cheating on each other like monkeys in heat. Ew, so messy.

The money came from the one word that defined the future: plastics.

Grandpa Max Baekeland invented Bakelite, which provided the Brits with telephones and Webley gun grips for generations and exiled his grandson Brooks (played by Stephen Dillane) to a feckless if comfy existence in places like New York, Cadiz and Majorca. In the '40s, he married a beautiful, ambitious and slightly nuts American actress and model named Barbara Daly (played by the superb Julianne Moore); eventually they had a son named Tony (played by super-creepy Eddie Redmayne).

The film presents the family's pathologies as massive, beginning with the fact that Ma and Pa hated each other. She was a social climber, he was a dour grump. She made scenes, he sat there stoic and grim. When their kid began displaying homosexual inclinations, Pa withdrew from the boy and Ma drew closer to him.

At a certain point, father steals son's girlfriend (a relationship encouraged by both parents), runs off and marries her. So the boy's new stepmother is somebody he used to date, but that's okay because he probably wouldn't have slept with her, being gay and all. Calling Dr. Freud.

Oh, wait, it gets funkier still. Soon all four are living as neighbors in beautifully restored old houses in a Spanish resort, financed by the British army's insatiable need for revolver grips. Ew. Then Ma moves a new boyfriend in, and soon he -- slinky, bisexual Eurotrash -- is sleeping with the son, too. Does threesome conjure any disturbing imagery when two of the three are mother and son?

Kalin plays this not for laughs but as "woman's drama," sappy and photographed through soft gauze in heavily appointed rooms. Too much damask, too many antique candelabras, if you ask me.

What he fails to provide in the slightest degree is energy. The movie just sloshes along, beautifully appointed as are those rooms, but in a heavy, slightly overdone way.

As performance platform, the story offers Moore a chance to go all Bette Davis on us, and she can't help herself. Who could, given the material? A confrontation with hubby and new wife in the airport, hysterical, profane and completely crazy, is played for all its freak show magnificence and is the high point of the thing. Really, only Redmayne, skinny, weirdly beautiful and almost completely androgynous, emerges with a bigger reputation than the one he started with.

But more creepiness lies ahead. Ma is finally compelled to save son from the crime that used to dare not speak its name, but now screams it from every rooftop, by seducing him. Yet when Kalin dramatizes the tryst, he makes it so joyless and grotesque, almost like a prison rape, that it somewhat overplays the hand. No one could know exactly how that moment went down, it has to be an extrapolation, and thus why does he choose these particular particulars (I'll spare the details) that leave each feeling soiled? The knife comes out soon enough, and it must be said that where he sloshes on the emotion, he underplays the violence. You might not even notice the actual wounding, and death arrives faster than by sniper's bullet, unlikely in the case of an instrument so imprecise as a knife.

Then comes the clinching detail that compelled the crime to fame: When a copper arrives, he finds the young man (he was 25) eating Chinese, which he ordered just after killing his ma.

In all, the Baekelands seemed to have provided us peasants enough raw material to keep us happy for years. They lived up to their part of the deal. Good show, old beans! But you wish, somehow, a more, rather than less, irresponsible filmmaker had gotten hold of the source material, a book by Natalie Robins and Steven M.L. Aronson. Imagine what John Waters could do with this plot, or Spike Jonze or even Barbet Schroeder, who helmed "Reversal of Fortune." Think about Louis Malle, who came from that world but who, unlike the Baekelands, didn't let inherited wealth destroy his capacity to contribute. Or even the great Billy Wilder, decadence's prime celebrant? But no: "Savage Grace" comes along courtesy of a director who didn't get the grace part.

Savage Grace (97 minutes, at TK theaters) is not rated and contains sexual content.