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.
#MOVIES LIKE SAVAGE GRACE MOVIE#
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.