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'Savage Grace'

Rating:

BY RAFER GUZMÁN | rafer.guzman@newsday.com

May 30, 2008

Rarely have the rich looked so splendid while behaving so abominably as in "Savage Grace," based on a 1985 novel about the Baekeland family, heirs to a fortune built on the pioneering plastic called Bakelite. Spoiled by wealth and privilege, they're the rottenest of eggs - but boy, do they dress well.

Julianne Moore, in another pitch-perfect portrayal of a damaged, doomed woman, plays Barbara, a onetime actress wed to the wealthy Brooks Baekeland (Stephen Dillane, fascinatingly complex in a small, enigmatic role). Their nasty marriage, full of mind games and rough sex, produces a fragile, sensitive son, Tony (Eddie Redmayne). When Brooks abandons his family, Tony becomes first his mother's keeper, then something more.

As the time frame moves from the 1940s to the 1970s, director Tom Kalin keeps a keen eye on couture. Barbara begins the film in a dreamy blue gown but ends it in a domineering button-down jacket; Tony's breezy poplin shirts give way to a dark, worsted suit. (Likewise, in his 1992 drama "Swoon," based on Leopold and Loeb, Kalin found cruelty in shiny cufflinks and spotless spats.)

Such details, along with Howard Rodman's fine-tuned script and terrific acting across the board (Hugh Dancy is marvelous as a fashionable, well-manicured monster) makes "Savage Grace" a pleasure - albeit a ghastly one - to watch.

SAVAGE GRACE (not rated). Based on the true-life tale of a socialite mother and son who grow a little too close. With Julianne Moore and Eddie Redmayne. 1:37 (language, sexual situations, brief violence). At IFC, Manhattan.