Director Tom Kalin is very specific about the kind of movies he makes. In Swoon, he created a puzzling, enigmatic and unforgettable tale of two gay lovers who kidnapped and murdered a child in the early 1920s, just for kicks. In his latest offering, he transforms Julliane Moore into a character few people would identify with, much less be able to feel sympathy for. He also puts Eddie Redmayne in the spotlight in portraying Moore's disturbed son.

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“Savage Grace”, based on the award-winning book of the same name, tells the incredible true story of Barbara Daly, who marries out of her class. Her husband, Brooks Baekeland, is the dashing heir to the Bakelite plastics fortune. Beautiful, red-headed and charismatic, Barbara is still no match for her well-bred husband. The birth of the couple’s only child,Tony, rocks the uneasy balance in this marriage of extremes. Tony is a failure in his father’s eyes. As he matures and becomes increasingly close to his lonely mother, the seeds for a tragedy of spectacular decadence are sown.

Spanning 1946 to 1972, the film unfolds in six acts. The Baekeland's pursuit of social distinction and the glittering “good life” propels them across the globe. We follow their heady rise and subsequent tragic fall against the backdrop of New York, Paris, Cadaques, Mallorca and London.

INTERVIEW WITH TOM KALIN

What do you think it was that initially attracted you to ‘Savage Grace’? As in SWOON you have again chosen a ‘taboo’ love story that culminates in murder, why?

Christine Vachon gave me ‘Savage Grace’ by Natalie Robins and Steven ML Aronson to read many years ago. I was riveted by the sensational truth at the core the Baekeland story, but even more by the echoes of classical tragedy. The sad beauty of the material drew me to it, the collision between elegance and violence. But the film’s terrible climax, Barbara’s death, is only part of her story. The originality of her uniquely American character (a self-made woman of the 1940s with a born gambler’s instinct) and her glittering rise and devastating fall contained the elements of what I believed would be an amazing drama.

In any story of this complexity there are inevitable simplifications, omissions and even modifications of characters. Howard and I tried to capture what we believed to be emotionally truthful while maintaining a healthy scepticism about the slippery nature of what becomes known as official history.

What drew you to Julianne Moore for the role of Barbara?

I met Julianne briefly when Todd Haynes made SAFE and then again later on the set of FAR FROM HEAVEN. Julianne is one of the most gifted actors working today and she brings an astonishing range and complexity to her work. I knew she would be unforgettable as Barbara and would instinctively know how to convey the humanity and emotional depth the role demanded.

I sent her the script and we met for lunch shortly after. I chattered nervously, while she looked at a binder of photographs of Barbara, Tony and Brooks I had brought. There was no denying her strong physical similarity to Barbara. Though this was an added bonus, it is Julianne’s ability to reveal emotion through the smallest moment of behaviour that brings Barbara to life. It was exciting too, to follow this character over an extended period of time, to watch Julianne convey the arc of a life through both triumph and failure.

The characters in SAVAGE GRACE are complex. Could you give us a quick overview from your point of view of the three main characters of Barbara, Brooks, and Tony?

BARBARA DALY BAEKELAND

Barbara Daly was born near Boston in 1920. When she was a teenager, her father committed suicide and his body was discovered by her brother, who later died in a car crash (perhaps not accidental). Like many beautiful young women of her generation with little money, she was urged by her mother to make a successful marriage. Courted by John Jacob Astor, she was declared one of the ten most beautiful women in New York. She went to Hollywood briefly in the early Forties and did a screen test with Dana Andrews.

She possessed a reckless charisma rare among women in her social circle and this volatility made her a magnet for Brooks. Her fatal flaw lay in her narcissism (rooted in deep insecurity) and her obsession with an unachievable notion of “society” and appearances. To those around her, she seems both brave and foolish, and her acts of self-invention display great strength of imagination but also reveal her fear of discovery and unmasking. But “society” alone is not enough for her and her need for love (from Brooks, from Tony, from Sam) is both deeply vulnerable and, at times, all-consuming.

BROOKS BAEKELAND

From ‘Savage Grace’ by Natalie Robins,Steven ML Aronson :

“ He [Brooks’ father George] also had dash, or what the French call panache. It was show. He was always, metaphorically speaking, standing at a mirror. ...But finally, his arrogance and his misanthropy were ego saving rationalizations for a deep shyness and sense of his social incapacities. I know this because I am his son and have inherited many of the same disabilities. My father roared out in the dark to keep the demons away. It was easy, being such a rich and protected man. As my grandfather used to say, “One of the uses of money is that it allows us not to live with the consequences of our mistakes.”

Though Brooks represents “society” to Barbara, he conceals from her his doubt as to whether this is indeed true. (His father’s bad business decisions diminished the family fortune and Brooks privately despaired that the genius of his grandfather was apparently not passed down to him.) He alternates between snobbery and the knowledge that his grandfather despised all the affectations and trappings of society. To a degree, Brooks will always hate himself for not rising above the limits of the world in which he lives. Trapped in his vanity and self-regard, he feels obligated to say what he believes to be the truth, without tenderness or compassion. He continues the family cycle and finds a new object of contempt in his own son, just as his father had in him.

ANTONY BAEKELAND

Tony never matures enough to transcend the conflicting, unbalanced sum of his parents’ influence, frozen between Barbara’s possessive love and Brooks’ contempt and indifference. He has grown to be unbalanced, with a highly developed imagination – he could become an artist or poet but is left weak and lacking resilience in other parts of life. Outwardly appealing to those around him, he possesses a kind of passive beauty, almost the mirror opposite of Barbara’s, inwardly fearing that he is ugly. He’s guilt ridden in part by the failure of his parents’ relationship. He once said to a friend, “My parents are both very young souls.”

Remarkably poised and apparently self-confident at age twelve, Tony never again feels this secure. When we meet him in Cadaques at age twenty, he rebels against his parents (sleeping with Jake, taking drugs). He unfortunately does not succeed in breaking free, however, and when Blanca leaves him for Brooks he is never able to fully recover.

Though at first he wants to escape (his parents, his heritage) and to make something of himself (and in this way he resembles Brooks) he finally loses his tenuous grasp on his motivation and his sanity and finds himself watching his life unfold from a great distance.

Is there still a real attraction between Brooks and Barbara despite his disdain, even disgust for her? Was their relationship not sadistic? What soured their marriage?

In many ways, Brooks was the weaker partner in an unbalanced marriage of extremes. Though, in his way, he deeply loved Barbara, he was ill-equipped to deal with her violent nature. I believe he eventually began to despise Barbara for her ability to infiltrate his upper-class world and blamed her for his unfulfilled potential.

After Barbara’s suicide attempt, Brooks wrote in a letter to a friend:

“Barbara has just about drained all there is to drain out of romantic (and not so romantic) violence where I am concerned... Her belief in force to get her way is fundamental in all things great and small, as everybody from waiter to prime ministers have experienced, and I have had to deal with that constantly for twenty five years. ...That is the trouble with melodrama – the climaxes are all used up in Act 1.

...She claims, (when it has sentimental social value), to be a Catholic born and bred. What she needs is some self-examination, not with a shrink but with a good old-fashioned Irish priest, who will ask her “What about it?” in those old-fashioned ethical terms that she understood before she went out to Hollywood in 1940 with John Jacob Astor hot on her lovely tail. It’s been show and little substance ever since. I help in that, of course.“

How do you see Barbara and Brook’s feelings with regard to Tony’s homosexuality? A delicate issue at the time, Barbara’s attitude seems all the while rather ambivalent...

Though some people believed that Barbara slept with Tony in an attempt to “cure him of his homosexuality”, I think the truth is far more subtle and complex. Sexuality was only one element of their ritual dance of dependence and wounding. Brooks was clearly repelled by Tony’s homosexuality and believed it was at the root of his failure in life. Barbara’s attitude, however, was more ambivalent. Though repelled by (Tony’s lover) Jake’s carnal magnetism and the spell he casts on Tony, she never abandons Tony in the way Brooks does.

Later, she disapproves of Tony’s decadent circle in London and can’t bear it when he disappears for days on end, what she refers to in the bathtub scene as “the Afternoon of the Longest Laundry”. Her jealousy here I think is fuelled by narcissism.

When she and Tony sleep with Sam, some have suggested that they were all taking psychedelic drugs, and certainly hashish. An excerpt from a letter written by Barbara to Sam, after he visited them in Mallorca, speaks volumes about her state of mind at the time :

“Our time together was not a playlet of Williams or a monstrous evocation of de Sade – but an acting out in a truly classical and beautiful way of a very old myth. Because we are veterans of this century we were unable to be really free and it is perhaps better that we were not, for some of us have fragile psyches and the strain would have been too great.“

Is the film in some way a social issue movie, despite the milieu that it depicts? Do you think the decadence that the Baekelands were surrounded with permitted an erosion of a certain morality?

Brooks’ grandfather Leo wrote something that anticipates his grandson’s future dilemma:

‘‘Most of the time people who travel try to cajole themselves into the belief that they are enjoying themselves, while in reality they are merely spending money right and left in increasing amounts without great satisfaction, or they keep rushing from one country to another in vain search of happiness. Such people will ordinarily finish by finding that two or three large capitals in Europe, with very elaborately appointed hotels, agree best with their perverted psychological condition.” A Family Motor Tour Through Europe, Leo H. Baekeland, 1907

Many authors have written about the doomed lives of American expatriates including Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Bowles, and James. The role of class in American culture continues to define every social interaction. Savage Grace is both the story of this very specific family and a cautionary tale about the price of going so far from home (literally and spiritually) that you can never find your way back.

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Tony’s parents are extraordinarily oblivious to the signs of his mental illness. Were they simply ignorant or incredibly self-centred?

Many witnesses to Tony’s final decline tried to intervene, with little success. A friend of the Baekelands confronted Brooks in the year before the murder :
I said, “Look here, your son is in a very bad state, he must have treatment.” He said, you know, “It’s just fun and games”—those were his words.

This escalating cycle of “fun and games”, between first Brooks and Barbara and, later Tony, took a devastating toll on all of them. Blind in so many ways to any alternative, their personalities bent under the collective strain. They lived their lives in a state of perpetual childhood, each in their own way. There’s also a delicate balance in this story between personal responsibility and inherited (or cultivated) self-destructiveness.

Tony’s once enchanting, poetic personality gradually disintegrated and he became increasingly angry and violent toward Barbara. Ironically, he found some solace during his incarceration in Broadmoor through Buddhism :

“I feel mummy’s presence around me, all the time. She is in every tree.”

Even still, to the end of his life, Tony was haunted by violent thoughts and dreams:

“Then I dreamed that Barbara had cut the back of my neck open so I could breathe.”

In the book, Brooks emerges the sole survivor of the tragedy, and perhaps the most culpable. To the end, he disliked Tony—found him embarrassingly odd. What was at the heart of that? Why do you think Brooks is threatened by Tony?

Brooks may seem arrogant on the outside, but he was actually quite perceptive about his particular brand of marital unhappiness :

“I soon realized that whether Barbara was pregnant or not – and she was not – I had not married a soul mate but a powerful and ambitious antagonist. She was a far more brilliant and a far stronger personality than I ever was or could be.”

“...I always felt I was not a great enough man for her. What she needed was a Henry VIII. But of course she finally had him – in her son, and he chopped off her head, so to speak.”

But he could be ruthless too, and remote in the extreme. When a friend confronted him about Barbara’s suicide attempt, Brooks took no responsibility at all :
And I said “Listen, I think it’s more than a bid for sympathy, because if that‘s what she intended it to be, she’s overdone it, because she damn near died... I told him she was in a coma. And he said, “Well, if she dies, you know where I am.” That chilled me... [Then] he said – and this is what really chilled me – he said, “When I met Barbara she was nothing, she was just this sort of redheaded Irish kid. I practically picked her out of the chorus line.”

Brooks is profoundly disappointed by his son’s inability to achieve what he believes to be the destiny of his family : greatness. But his disappointment with Tony is, in part, despair at his own failings.

Watch the trailer and some selected scenes from the movie:

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Brooks is so annoyed by Barbara’s pretensions, but isn’t he just as pretentious? Does his conceit mask a weak intellect?

According to many who knew him, Brooks had an original mind but lacked the discipline to realize the fruits of his intellect. He excelled in his studies in Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University but never finished the degree. For years he claimed to be writing a novel, though none has ever surfaced. Both he and Barbara had a kind of brilliance, though each of a very different kind.

Do you see Brook’s new relationship with Blanca as different? Is their relationship more about him respecting her intellectually and socially rather than the fact that she’s younger?

It’s too easy to judge Blanca, or to reduce Brooks’ relationship with her to a pale imitation of his marriage to Barbara. Recently divorced and worldlier than many of the young expatriates who flock to Cadaques, Blanca stands out from the crowd with her enigmatic beauty and her self-contained aura. Although she is intellectually astute (she studied philosophy in Paris), she possesses a natural social charm and an innate instinct for the “youth style” of the 1960s. Born to a middle-class family, she masks her ambition with a guileless, earthy quality that encourages people to underestimate her.

Blanca is a true chameleon, equally comfortable in jeans and peasant blouses and, later, when she marries Brooks, haute couture. Comfortable in her skin, her confidence and elusive personality draws people into her orbit. Initially attracted by Tony’s slightly passive, tender quality, she ultimately falls hard for Brooks’ (oddly charming) air of chilly egotism. The grandeur of the Baekeland family legacy fascinates her and she is swept up by Brooks’ aura of “old-money” entitlement. Under his tutelage she rapidly transforms from hippie-chick to bourgeois lady. Tony fails to hold her attention for long and he is wounded by her abandonment.
Barbara initially welcomes Blanca into their lives and encourages Tony to pursue a relationship, but recognizing an uncomfortably familiar social ambition, Barbara finally despises Blanca for her youth, beauty and success at attracting Brooks. Though Blanca’s social climbing is unmasked through her radical re-invention, I didn’t want to judge her. The fascination of this material lies in its many conflicting angles of view.

It’s been a little while since SWOON – yet you have been working in film and video ever since. Why such a long wait to do another feature film? Has your work as a video artist informed your vision as a feature film director?

My feature work after Swoon includes work as a Producer. I was Executive Producer of Rose Troche’s debut feature, Go Fish that premiered to great acclaim at Sundance and Producer of Mary Harron’s remarkable first feature, I Shot Andy Warhol that came to Cannes in 1996.

I directed a short film to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of fashion designer Geoffrey Beene inspired by silent film and featuring Marcia Gay Harden, Viveca Lindfors, Russell Wong and Claire Danes. My short film Plain Pleasures starring Frances McDormand, Lili Taylor and Will Patton received a national US broadcast on PBS. Since 1985 I have made a wide variety of short works in a range of media including video, super-8, 16mm and installation. Exhibited internationally in museums, galleries and festivals, these entirely hand-made works provide a liberating corollary to the enormity of feature film production. These short, experimental pieces offer a laboratory for invention; a place to play and differ sharply from my more classically structured narrative work.

[ Directors' Fortnight at Cannes ] [ Tom Kalin @IMDb ] [ Savage Grace updates at GreenCine ] [ Dendy Films ]

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Comments (4)

Will It Premiere @ TIFF?

Even though nothing has officially been announced on the TIFF website yet, I happen to notice on the IMDb Savage Grace page, that it states that this film will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 10/07.

It will certainly be interesting to see how this will be received. I did read I believe that it got some mixed reviews when it premiered at Cannes in May. Sounds like quite a complex story, and Julianne Moore is a great actress, and very striking. Eddie Redmayne is somewhat of a newcomer to me, but I'd be interested to see him in this film as well. I happen to notice from the movie poster....Eddie and Julianne could probably pass as mother and son, since both have freckles.:p

Thanks so much Jed for this very interesting interview with Tom Kalin. It really delves into what the story and movie is all about.

Jan , July 10, 2007

Reviews from mainstream media

yes, the film got mix reviews, but I tend to ignore some of them, simply because they are from mainstream media, and some of them are already biased, leaning towards commercial type of films, those that will allow some of them to earn a living. I respect a lot of film reviewers, but there are some you can actually see from the reviews they have written that they are trying to promote (even protect) their own selfish agenda.

I think its up to the audience to judge if this film is worth watching out. The director has a reputation for preferring biopics, and he has proven himself already, so i think given the chance that this film is being shown as part of the biggest film festivals, is already an indication of its appeal.

Admin , July 10, 2007

...

I go by my own judgement if I like a movie or not, and not always by a film critics opinion or judgement.

I have not seen Swoon, but that too sounds like a good story. Disturbing that its a true story though.

When you sort of think of it, its surprising in a way, how sometime when mainstream media frowns upon controversial subject matters like this in movies, and often these subject matters in films actually happened in real life!

Jan , July 10, 2007

so true!

right on target Jan! I could not agree more. Sometimes, and actually its too often that movies bearing controversial topics are shot down even before it has the chance to be shown on theatres, and with the way movies are shown today, its hard for an indie film, much more for a movie that carry a controversial theme to really break into the main crowd. Of course, it would only be reasonable for film producers to get back their investment, and it would seem better for us, the audience, if we get the chance to really savour films that are intelligent and discuss topics that we need to be enlightened, otherwise, we can just continue watching films like Fantastic Four and get nothing. I tried to watch it, but I fell asleep...unlike Half-Nelson or Little Miss Sunshine or Brick or Red Road, these are great movies! We need more films like these!

Admin , July 12, 2007

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