The Screengrab : the young and the restless

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Savage Grace"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

The 1985 book Savage Grace by Natalie Robins and Steven M. L. Aronson, told the story of Barbara Daly, a social climbing beauty who married Brooks Baekeland, the heir to a plastics fortune, and her incestuous relationship with her damaged son, Tony, who wound up stabbing her to death in 1972. Coming out when it did, in the era of the Reagans and Dynasty and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, the book had a special appeal, especially since it was written mostly in the form of an oral history, with testimony from various observers and other interested parties. Tony's murder of his mother may have made it possible to file it neatly under "true crime", but what gave it is juice was the chance to sit in on what amounted to a seminar's worth of gossip about just how deeply twisted and fucked-up a very rich, very beautiful, very socially ambitious family really was. For maximum impact, the book ought to have been filmed not long after it came out, maybe with Brian De Palma or the Barbet Schroeder of Reversal of Fortune at the helm, but it might still be good sleazy fun if Tom Kalin hadn't gotten ahold of it.

As he demonstrated with his first film, the art-house train wreck Swoon, Kalin lacks, and may be completely uninterested in, certain attributes that are helpful to narrative filmmakers. He isn't very good at working with actors to develop characters, he can't shape his materials into a coherent story, and he has no ability to create a sense of believable life onscreen. What he mainly has is an interest--a chilly, academic interest--in "transgressive" behavior that, in Swoon, resulted in a movie that, to the extent that it was coherent at all, seemed to suggest that Leopold and Loeb were martyred victims of society because all they did was kill a kid, whereas everybody else was homophobic. Savage Grace seems taken with the idea of Barbara Daly Baekeland as heroic victim, a woman who's so much ;arger than life that the world can't possibly give her all the love and attention she requires. It's a choice that cuts off Julianne Moore's oxygen supply as an actress; instead of getting the chance to play the sacred monster of the book, she's stuck in a vaccuum, working her Mona Lisa smile. The movie begins with Barbara (Julianne Moore) and Brooks (Stephen Dillane, whose performance as a stiffly dashing natural aristocrat looks to have been researched by spending a few mornings studying Eric Braeden's Victor on The Young and the Restless) already married, and already practically sworn enemies. It's less interested in even comprehending how they wound up together than in charting the downward spiral of Barbara and Tony (played as an adult by Eddie Redmayne, a relative newcomer to movies who needs to learn that it's okay to just tell the camerman, "Look, don't light me so that I look like that guy in Napoloen Dynamite, okay?"), in each other's arms.

Even with Moore spouting such lines to her son as, "Will you still love me when my hair is gray and my tits are sagging?", the relationship is much closer and more tender than it was portrayed in the book; Barbara is no longer the kind of woman who'd ship her kid off to school to get him out of her way while she's planning to lay siege to the dinner-party circuit, and Tony is no longer a violent, angry boy whose final attack on his mother was just the last in a series. (The actual death scene is staged as a Sid and Nancy-style cop-out: Hey, let's go in the kitchen and act out hysterical scenes from old Joan Crawford movies, oh shit, look out for that knife!) It would seem odd if Tony did have a well of killing rage stored up against his mother in this version, because Moore's Barbara doesn't seem to cause him much pain; her social-climbing foolishness hurts no one but herself. Dishonest as it is, what really kills the movie is Kalin's simple inability to bring any of this stuff to life. His erotic images--Tony dancing on the beach with another boy to please a girl he likes; Barbara, at the wheel of a car with Tony and the girl in the back seat, swerving around to toss them into each other's arms; a little homage to Un Chant d'Amour with Tony's boyfriend from the beach delicately slipping a puff of cigarette smoke into his mouth-- have no excitement to them, and the most explicit sex scene, with Barbara coming to Brooks as a supplicant on her knees and he brutally taking her from behind, is mean-spirited in a way that does nothing but stress the dubious notion of Barbara as everybody's victim. She winds up alone in her big house, attempting suicide in between bouts of sex with gay men, including her son. Julianne Moore goes through her paces dutifully, but she might need to take a little break from representing scandalously rethought versions of maternal figures from earlier eras. The truth is that she doesn't get much of a chance here to do anything that doesn't set off echoes of things she's done before, and when you consider what she actually gets up to here, it's kind of scary to think that she's in a rut.

Caught in the Net: The Pitiful History of the Internet Thriller

Phil Nugent — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Steve Johnson contemplates the ongoing disappointment that is the Internet thriller. It's not as if Hollywood has ever trusted computers any farther than they could throw them. HAL 9000 tried to hog the spacecraft for himself in 2001: Space Odyssey; in Colossus: The Forbin Project, an electronic super-brain invented by the guy who plays Victor on my grandmother's beloved The Young and the Restless, was designed to serve as a perfect missile defense system but immediately started acting too big for its business; its descendant, the computer in WarGames almost started World War III in an excess of playfulness; and don't get me started on that weekend at Westworld. (Hell, I had more fun at Euro Disney.) But for the better part of a decade now, Hollywood has been specifically trying to tap into the supposedly vast, ominous potential of the Internet and hook into some of those cool cyberpunk dollars, with decidedly mixed results. "Like a virus shrugging off an outdated antibiotic," Johnson writes, "the Net has proved resistant to such attempts. You've seen evidence of the struggle. Over and over, Hollywood has shown us things happening on computer monitors in improbably large and cartoonish letters, as if all Web sites dealing with national security are designed by the folks at Webkinz. 'To eliminate Baltimore, click here,' that kind of thing."

You can see the thinking. Someone with mad hacking skills could spy on you, erase your identity, fill your Netflix queue with Ed Burns movies, make your life hell itself. That line of thinking helped produce such early cyberduds as The Net, in which hackers laid siege to Sandra Bullock while the audience just sat there wondering why she was so hard up for company that she was hanging out with Dennis Miller. Then there was Hackers starring Jonny Lee Miller and an alarmingly hot young Angelina Jolie (sporting an English accent and cobalt-blue nail polish) as the leaders of a team of master web surfers who run afoul of an evil computer genius called The Plague (Fisher Stevens), who single-handedly caused the cancellation of our plans to compose a list of the Ten Lamest Movie Super-Villains because the computer that writes our Top Ten lists kept insisting on assigning his name to all ten slots. (The most convincing hackers in movies are the team of government-run nerds in Enemy of the State--Jack Black is among them--who act like big swinging dicks when they're alone in a dark room with their computer screens in front of them and who fold faster than Superman on laundry day when pulled into the light and asked to account for what they've been doing--just following orders, natch.) More recently, as in Untraceable, movies have tried to go the Lee Siegel route of suggesting that there's just something about the 'Net that short circuits the frontal lobes and renders people incapable of fighting off their baser instincts. Here, the villain is a serial killer who yokes his victims to a webcam and urges people to check in at his site, "killwithme," having made it clear that "the more that watch, the faster he dies." Naturally, people watch in droves. (The set-up faintly recalls The Card Player, a 2002 Dario Argento horror in which the serial killer bets the victim's life on a video card game with the cops; if the killer wins, he executes his latest captive in front of a webcam while the police watch on helplessly.)

There are real anxieties and fears involving the Internet just waiting to be tapped for the movies, but there's a built-in problem identified by the writer Scott Rosenberg: "Movies are overwhelmingly a visual medium, and dealing with the Internet is the parallel problem to dealing with writing. In the old days it was a typewriter. There aren't a lot of great movies about someone sitting at a typewriter." The great Internet paranoia fantasy of the movies may still be the original The Matrix, which shot right past the realistic image of someone tapping away at a keyboard and conjured up an impressively imagined world of thrilling liberation and terrifying imprisonment. It understood that what's exciting, and scary, about the Internet is the sense it can give you that you're exploring strange new worlds at the same time that you are, in actual fact, sitting on your ass typing. The Matrix somehow found a way to show what that fantasy neverland located somewhere between the keyboard and the brain might look like, while other attempts to visualize the experience, such as Johnny Mnemonic, became too literal-minded and hit the earth with a splat. And having gotten it right that first time, the Wachowskis then spent a lot of time and money proving just how hard it is to do. As a wise man once said: "Whoa."