Barbara Daly Baekland was an actress who married Brooks Baekland, heir to a Bakelite plastics company, and together they spent their lives living glamorously while doing not much of anything else.  Barbara and Brooks had a son, Tony, who watched his parents’ marriage become a façade and eventually implode.  Brooks eventually ran off with a younger woman whom was Tony’s “girlfriend” and later, Barbara, disturbed by her son’s homosexuality, allegedly coerced him into having sex with her.

An emotionally unstable woman, Barbara was prone to erratic mood swings and attempted suicide several times.  Sadly, Tony seemed to inherit his mother’s mental illness and was diagnosed as a schizophrenic, the signs of which became apparent in his early 20s.  In 1972, Tony stabbed and killed his mother and supposedly was found ordering Chinese food as the police arrived.

These details about the lives and deaths of the Baeklands are laid out in the 1985 book, Savage Grace, written by Natalie Robins and Steven M. L. Aronson.  The book has been loosely adapted into a film by the same name and is being released on DVD December 23. Directed by Tom Kalin (Swoon), the film is an intriguing, condensed version of the Baekland tragedy starring Eddie Redmayne (The Good Shepherd) as the troubled Tony, and the incomparable Julianne Moore as the smothering mother, Barbara.

Working from a screenplay by Howard A. Rodman, the film quickly dives into the twisted world of Barbara and her desire to climb the social ladder.  As baby Tony sleeps at home with his grandmother, the parents are out on the town.  It is New York in 1946, and Barbara already shows signs that she’s not all there.  After a later dinner game of questions between socialites, Barbara, upset by Brooks’ answer that he would (theoretically) go home with the first woman who walks through the door, jumps in a passing car with three strange men and drives off laughing, leaving Brooks aghast and pondering who the hell it is he married.  Brooks is played by Stephen Dillane (HBO’s John Adams) who gives the role the right mixture of disdain, aloofness and sadness to make us not like him, yet feel a slight touch of sympathy for him having to live with a force of nature like Barbara. (more…)