Review of Savage Grace

I have to give this some marks for the acting all round, and a great performance by Julianne Moore - and I suppose for the production values. But the directing, script and angling of this true, extraordinary tale of an American family's dynastic downfall leaves the story essentially untold. As I understood it from the excellent book, Savage Grace, the mother, Barbara is a pushy, energetic socialite from the other side of the tracks who clashes with her husband's bitterness as the decadent, worthlessly cultured scion of the great Bakelite family. Her chosen 'place in the sun' (movie title of Dreisler's American Tragedy) is with the rich bohemian set and her energy is set at revitalising the family. Her husband's talent being limited to making sarcastic quips, she pushes at her son to show real talent as an artist, which he doesn't possess, and sleeps with him in order to 'cure' him of homosexuality. Although displaying the hubris and feral criminality of a Greek tragic heroine, she (and her son) are in a sense victims of a great family's fall from grace. But the film meanders through sensual details of the boy's gay affairs, shows the husband as charming, gives little sense of the dynastic background, throws away much pointless dialogue without capturing the flavour of rich bohemia, and has just one dramatic scene, the crucial one of incest and murder. I was disappointed because I know Majorca, where much of the real-life drama was set, as well as the social scene and some of the people peripheral to the drama; but more so because this American tragedy cries out for an intense and absorbing study of wealth, social ambition and the tragic consequences of a family falling from the heights of scientific, commercial and cultural achievement to incest and murder. It's not really about watching attractive gay people lounging about in the sun and a few name-dropping suppers.