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.