A director who's drawn to murder most foul
Tom Kalin returns with 'Savage Grace'
NEW YORK - Tom Kalin is picking up right where he left off.
It's been 16 years since Kalin's last feature film, but he's mining familiar territory with another tabloid-ready tale of a psychosexual relationship between a damaged duo who perpetrate brutal acts of physical and emotional violence.
When Kalin burst onto the scene at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival, it was with "Swoon," a haunting examination of the infamous real-life 1920s child killers and purported lovers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. The film quickly became a New Queer Cinema landmark. Now, Kalin's back with "Savage Grace," which opens Friday, based on another shocking true crime tale about - what else? - a twisted, codependent relationship that illicitly shatters social and cultural boundaries.
Based on an exhaustively detailed nonfiction tome of the same name, "Savage Grace" stars Julianne Moore as the flame-tressed American socialite Barbara Daly Baekeland, a gorgeous, charming yet tempestuous woman who leaves a trail of dysfunction and depravity in her wake. Prone to wild mood swings, Barbara battles with her arrogant husband, Brooks (Stephen Dillane), the heir to the Bakelite plastics fortune, and smothers her gay teenage son Tony (Eddie Redmayne) until her world implodes in an Oedipal tragedy of incest and murder.
So why this penchant for sordid stories of narcissistic intertwined souls? "I'm fascinated by the idea of two people who become halves of a whole and com mit a crime together. What is it about the particular chemistry between them that leads to murder? What happens when the balance of power and love becomes so out of whack in a relationship," Kalin says during an interview at the Tribeca Film Festival and, later, at a coffee shop near his downtown apartment.
Still, he insists, with a laugh, "I'm not going to make a career out of filming symbiotic stories about messed-up people who destroy each other."
"Savage Grace" first came to Kalin's attention when Killer Films honcho Christine Vachon, who serves as co-producer, handed him the book. He was immediately smitten with the story.
"It crackled. It's like the article you read in Vanity Fair by the pool, and you think, 'Oh my God, I can't believe it!' But it's Greek tragedy; it goes much deeper," Kalin says. "All the characters seemed like they were out of a Henry James or Edith Wharton novel."
Indeed, the film fuses the family melodrama of classic Tennessee Williams with the bed-hopping, pill-popping of '80s trash TV like "Dynasty," spiced with the true-crime drama of "In Cold Blood."
Barbara's story actually begins in Boston, specifically West Roxbury, where she grew up. After briefly flirting with a modeling career and Hollywood stardom, the young beauty marries Brooks and embarks on a life of leisure in Europe, meandering from Paris to Mallorca to London and hobnobbing with the social and cultural elite. As the tempestuous relationship with her husband becomes strained by the birth of their only child, Barbara turns her suffocating attention on the precocious boy, who grows into a laconic, drug-taking dandy with his own inner demons. When Brooks finally leaves his wife for a younger woman, Barbara's unseemly dependence on Tony deepens in disturbing ways.
"I always found in playing Barbara that she had no idea where she ended and the world began," says Moore, a Boston University grad, perched on a couch in a Manhattan hotel suite. "So the challenge became: How do you present this kind of monstrous behavior on a human scale? You try to find a way to make it three-dimensional. But you don't even have to make it totally understandable because we don't always understand why somebody does what they do."
Kalin doesn't expect audiences to understand - or identify with - Barbara, Brooks, and Tony's extreme behavior. "That's the tricky part. Narrative film is generally seen as a form where you ask the audience to identify with the characters," he says. "So maybe 'Savage Grace' is an experiment in: Can you ask an audience to have compassion or empathy [for] characters without necessarily identifying with them in the traditional sense?"
With his self-effacing manner, Kalin admits that he, too, has a hard time relating to the characters. "I actually love and adore my family. And strangely, I have a sort of lighthearted, well-adjusted personality in counterpart to the movies I make," he says, with a sly smile. "Of course, films let you explore things you would never live, which is fascinating."
Despite enjoying a warm reception during its premiere at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, "Savage Grace" has been greeted with mostly tepid notices as it has rolled out stateside over the past few weeks. Some reviewers have accused Kalin of gawking at the decadence and depravity and offering little psychological insight into the characters's motivations.
For his part, Kalin believes mental illness (Tony was later diagnosed as schizophrenic) and the family's decadent and insular lifestyle helped contribute to their downfall. "I think Barbara encouraged tendencies in Tony, psychologically and emotionally, and crippled him, by loving him both too much and too little," he says.
One interpretation that does raise Kalin's ire is the idea that Barbara sleeps with Tony to cure him of his homosexuality. "I don't think it's as simple as that, because, actually, Barbara's attitude toward Tony's homosexuality is quite complicated in the movie. . . . I'm also interested in the idea of: Is it a murder? Is it a suicide? Does Barbara unconsciously use her son as a tool with which to kill herself? Because as a narcissist, she has to rely on someone inside her orbit to help her accomplish the mission. And who better to choose than the person she thinks she loves the most in the world?"
While Kalin admits the taboo topic of incest doesn't exactly lend itself to boffo box office, he argues that the movie is not all that explicit. "The way the sex scenes are rendered, it's as much about what is left off the screen as what's left on," he says. "It was never my intention to make a salacious film. I'm also not an idiot. I know the culture we live in, and I know that people's reactions to such loaded material will be visceral, for sure."
Sixteen years ago, reactions to New Queer Cinema films like "Swoon" and Todd Haynes's "Poison" were similarly hot-blooded, with some commentators blasting them as "filth." At this year's Sundance festival, Kalin was reunited with some of his rabble-rousing brethren, including Gregg Araki and Bruce LaBruce, at a party hosted by IFC. "It's funny, it's now middle-aged queer cinema. We're almost ready for walkers and canes," he says with a grin.
The films of that movement share a radical DNA -born out of despair, anger, and disillusion. "Our lives had been rocked by HIV and years of Reaganism, followed by Bush. 'Swoon' was in many ways fueled by the AIDS crisis. The emotional feeling of it came out of that period," Kalin says. "As time has passed it's become clear to me that it was very much about that moment in history."
After a 15-year hiatus between feature projects, the obvious questions arise: What's Kalin been up to and why the long hibernation? The director explains that he had, in fact, developed several other narrative features that, for various reasons, never came to fruition, including a film about the longtime friendship and artistic collaboration between punk poetess Patti Smith and maverick photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
Still, Kalin kept himself busy making experimental and dramatic shorts, including films with Frances McDormand, Marcia Gay Harden, and Claire Danes. He produced two acclaimed indies during the '90s, Rose Troche's "Go Fish" and Mary Harron's "I Shot Andy Warhol." He also teaches film at Columbia University and has several new feature projects in the pipeline, including a fictional love story set against the backdrop of the advent of the film production code in the 1930s.
"It's always been hard to find money to make movies, particularly movies that tell stories that are unconventional or are outside mainstream tastes," Kalin says, without a hint of regret. "To make a film, you have to have a persistence of vision. You have to have a certain amount of endurance to march toward your goal. But it's been rewarding creatively. And in the big picture, I have enjoyed it enough to keep slugging at it."
