Thursday evening, on the eve before Independence Day, friends were either absent or otherwise engaged Roaming about online, I checked Movies.com to see if anything interesting was playing in my area, and discovered an art-house (my favorite genre) film starring Julianne Moore running at the Albany Twin, minutes from my place. I quickly threw back on my work clothes, grabbed my briefcase and headed out.
This biopic ventures into the bizarre woods of a wealthy family. From the offset, one imagines that it will revolve around the son's homosexuality but that is only one subtext to the meandering rough road this irresolute clan wends its way across.
Julianne Moore dazzles the socialite world as Barbara Baekeland, warm in the vaunted graces yet chilling with her unnerving laughter. She is assuredly the most passionate of the characters in the film. (Though Hugh Dancy and Unax Ugalde shimmer in minor but significant roles). And saying that is saying quite a lot. The mood, the pacing, the shooting, all bequeath the viewer a sort of crystallized detachment; almost as if the characters are being glimpsed through a dull prism which light can only penetrate as listless rays of bright shadow. This detachment finds it ultimate expression in Tony (played masterfully by Eddie Redmayne), the couple's emotionally anemic son. His life's pursuit is the careful and careless construction of a broken bridge: he is quite literally "the steam" between his mother's "heat" and his father's "cold". In seeking to navigate the storms of their marriage, and the internecine battles during and after the divorce, Tony shows like a pale, weak watercolor, soon to be devoured by the raging sea. He embodies absolute disregard because he disregards his own needs. His sexuality is at best a limp worm, burrowing sightlessly; cavalierly destroying the link with the one spark of passion in his world - Ugalde's lovely, leather-clad wastrel character - in a meaningless tumble with Dancy's polished gallant.
The detachment becomes the subsuming force as the film crests, and follows the descending helix of the intensified but emotionally mute interwoven narratives. The father, Stephen Dillane as Brooks Baekeland, begins as a pompous drone, obviously aware that he is the lesser light. He basks in the accomplishments of his grandfather, eschewing his own father, and desperate to prove his mettle despite being an empty vessel. He is glacial, bristling and watery before the hauteur of his clever wife. He is born to money but she is heir apparent to the throne. And this chafes him to undying enmity towards her, planting seeds of bitterness which he will draw on to chasten her in his departure from formal family life. Even in such a state, his hatred is conducted in a sang-froid manner. Barbara reacts by retreating at first, reawakening her artistic impulses with Dancy's encouragement, and finally setting in place oedipal circumstances which can only lead to tragedy. As the decades crawl, her dress remains stylish and fashionable. Yet the clothing looses it warmth and elasticity as if reflecting the staleness encroaching on her life. She is calculating in public and neurotically needy in private. Tony shifts his energies toward his mother, writing unanswered missives to his father, and moving closer to a separation (a deterioration) between his emotional, mental and physical spheres. The culmination of his aloofness brings the film to conclusion and presages his final destructive acts.
In the midst of it all, one is not so much horrified as bewildered by the pluperfect disassociation of self and community which accompanies the happenings. There is an utter sense of removal which makes the lens appear to be telling a two-dimensional tale with three-dimensional cutouts. If detachment was the aim, it is achieved.
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