Eddie Redmayne's portrayal of her homosexual son was for me the stand-out performance. Her performance was as good as usual, portraying Barbara Daly Baekeland, wife of the Bakelite heir. Julianne Moore is an actress I admire and takes top billing. The parallels between these stories are remarkable. This film would make a terrific companion piece to Christophe Honoré's Ma mère, as it tackles similarly challenging themes, though it is based on a true story and is much more digestible for audiences.
Vachon's films often portray unconventional sexuality or other challenging social themes, but in a stylised way that is more accessible to wider audiences than grittier art-house films.
This is a gripping, coldly brilliant and tremendously acted movie.Having seen quite a few films produced by Christine Vachon, I recognised a similar aesthetic in this film. When Tony helps his mother from the bath, the camera lingers on her knees and she looks as vulnerable as a sickly child. Appropriately for the leisured classes, Kalin has an eye for the mood and feeling of ennui. It is a story of the very rich, a milieu rarely and not always convincingly rendered in the movies: a brittle world of selfish people who are never sympathetic and often never even comprehensible. Tony is enamoured of Blanca (Elena Anaya), a beautiful young Spanish woman to whom he surrenders his virginity - a brilliant, uncomfortable scene - while his parents are next door, but this liaison is to lead to an appalling betrayal, which throws Tony into even closer intimacy with his mother.
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Kalin contrives a series of spacious historical episodes showing the family's wanderings over 30 years from New York to Paris, Spain and finally London. Eddie Redmayne plays the beautiful, cosseted Tony, whose own jottings do not result in any Proustian achievement, but merely a languid, rancid dissatisfaction. Stephen Dillane plays Brooks, himself seething with a sense of inferiority, in his case to his grandfather, the inventor of Bakelite plastic and the alpha-male ancestor and high-achiever in comparison to whom his life is as nothing. "Of course I shall host your little party," says one grande dame, and Barbara flinches imperceptibly at the put-down, recovers in an instant and is oleaginously grateful and relieved: Moore conveys the sequence of facial events with great precision. After completing some paintings, including one awful Woolworths-type self-portrait with child, she organises an exhibition and scrapes up acquaintance with patrician artistic types in London, angling to use one of their salons as the venue for the post-vernissage luncheon. Her Barbara is always boiling internally with need: need for love, for tenderness, for social affirmation. But this is a fierce and interesting refinement of the role. Julianne Moore plays Barbara - and after this film, and movies like The Hours and Far from Heaven, she is in danger of being typecast as the high-camp suffering mother. Mother, father and son created a dysfunctional love triangle which ended in violence and bloodshed. She could find a smothering intimacy only with her gay son, Tony Daly. Her drinking, her propensity for making a scene in public, and her weakness for pseudo-bohemian adulterous flings evidently made the marriage a living hell. Barbara Daly was the would-be actress, artist and social alpinist who in postwar New York married wealthy Brooks Baekeland, a travel writer and heir to the Bakelite fortune. It is a sensational, lurid story: erotic and repulsive by overlapping turn.
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A sick-room torpor hangs heavily about this masterfully controlled, elegantly composed movie by Tom Kalin, his first full-length feature since the much-admired Swoon from 1992.
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