Savage Grace |
In 1992, Tom Kalin boosted the then rising Gay New Wave with Swoon, his brilliantly stylized version of the Leopold-and-Loeb thrill killing. Since then he’s swooned a bit himself, turning out only the occasional short. He returns with a more conventional period piece, though it’s about an even more lurid subject — the Baekeland family, heirs to the Bakelite fortune. Let’s just say that F. Scott Fitzgerald was in the ballpark when he said that the rich are different from you and me. Covering three decades of the haut monde with woozy accuracy, Kalin chronicles the creepy ménage of wispy scion Tony (Eddie Redmayne), philandering and cuckolded dad Brooks (Stephen Dillane), and mom Barbara, who as played by Julianne Moore makes Annette Bening’s high-maintenance mother in Running with Scissors look like Laura Bush. The laid-back approach both intensifies and normalizes the weirdness, and Moore’s tour-de-force performance, caroming from mannered to horrific to heartbreaking, is this year’s bravest, if not its best. 97 minutes | Kendall Square
