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NEW YORK
—JULIANNE MOORE has made a specialty of suffering in
silence, her pale skin pulling tight across her
cheekbones to form a flawless mask, a shell of perfect
beauty concealing a soul in deepest turmoil. Only in
private moments, when no one but the audience is
watching, do the cracks begin to show.
In her
new film Savage Grace, the mask doesn’t crack so
much as shatter.
Moore plays Barbara Baekeland, a onetime actress who married
the heir to the Bakelite plastic fortune. Her every
gesture governed by calculation, Barbara is capable of
playing the perfect high-society hostess. But when she
feels threatened, the façade drops in an instant,
revealing the raw and uncontrollable fury beneath.
Invented
by Leo Baekeland in 1907, Bakelite was the first
industrial plastic, used in a variety of products,
including costume jewelry and land mines, and it made
its inventor a wealthy man. But the idleness that came
with inherited wealth took its toll on subsequent
generations, including Baekeland’s grandson, Brooks,
Barbara’s husband.
Set in
Paris, London and Catalonia, Savage Grace basks
in the perfume of postwar decadence, but underneath is
the sour smell of moral rot. “For all of us, there are
boundaries in the way we behave with each other,” Moore
said, chewing the ice from her diet soda a few blocks
from the West Village apartment she shares with her
husband, director Bart Freundlich, and their two
children. “The thing that was so shocking to me was that
they just didn’t abide by any of them, ever.” She
laughs. “Ever!”
Drawn
from Natalie Robins and Steven M.L. Aronson’s oral
history of the Baekelands’ downfall, the movie focuses
on Barbara’s convoluted and eventually grotesque
relationship with her son, Tony, played from adolescence
on by British actor Eddie Redmayne. As Barbara’s
marriage to Brooks Baekeland faltered, she came
increasingly to rely on her son for emotional, and
eventually physical, solace. In 1972, some time after
their relationship had become incestuous, Tony drove a
kitchen knife through his mother’s heart in the kitchen
of their London flat. He later killed himself in prison.
‘Violence and elegance’
MOORE, 47, got her earliest recognition for her role as
Frannie Hughes on the soap opera As the World Turns, but
it wasn’t until her early 30s that she began to make a
mark in film, most forcefully by playing a marital spat
in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts naked from the
waist down.
Barbara
Baekeland is the latest in a long line of elegantly
tortured women of privilege portrayed by Moore, running
from 1995’s Safe through 2002’s The Hours
and Far From Heaven, both of which garnered her
Oscar nominations.
Although
Moore points out that she has played her share of
lighthearted characters, singling out the Viking
helmet-wearing Fluxus artist from The Big Lebowski,
her signature roles are women stifled by social
conventions.
As
Barbara, Moore epitomizes what Savage Grace
director Tom Kalin calls “the collision between violence
and elegance.” Barbara’s every action is governed by
propriety, but she is far more volatile than most of
Moore’s long-suffering housewives, her emotions
whipsawing like power lines in a windstorm.
“I
haven’t played somebody who can self-destruct like that
before,” she said. “She was so emotional, all this need,
this desire to be seen, and to be loved. It was a messy
kind of emotion, and that intrigued me.”
Obsessed
with upward mobility, Barbara’s life is a constant
performance, ironically fulfilling her claim that she
was “almost a movie star.” But on rare occasions, Moore
lets Barbara’s self-awareness slip, so we see the
actress behind the role. When she catches her husband at
the airport with another woman, Barbara makes a scene of
royal proportions, neatly cutting him down to size. Only
once does Moore let her sorrow show, emotion flooding
her face as she walks slowly toward the camera. For a
movie that could have come off as a chilly technical
exercise, Moore’s ability to pack immense feeling into a
few fleeting instances is critical. “In those little
turnings, in those silent moments of performance, she
has great empathy, great humanity,” Kalin says.
Meaning
in tiny gestures
LIKE
Savage Grace, which premiered at Cannes in 2007,
Moore’s recent Blindness polarized the crowds at
this year’s festival. The first wave of
US
press was largely dismissive of Fernando Meirelles’
dystopian allegory, set in a world where everyone except
Moore’s character has suddenly lost the power of sight,
labeling it ponderous and heavy-handed (European critics
were significantly more enthusiastic). But Moore says
Meirelles is adept at leavening the film’s weightier
aspects with powerful flickers of human feeling. “The
thing he does that I think is so spectacular is that he
paints with this big brush,” she says. “There’s a lot of
camera movement, and everything is very emotional, very
universal, and then he’ll key in on a moment where he’ll
play somebody’s eyes, and that will be the action in the
frame. One person touching another: That tiny gesture is
meaningful to him. I find it very, very moving.”
Moore prefers to work with “strong directors” who can give
her a sense of how she stands in the frame, a group that
includes Robert Altman, Louis Malle, Todd Haynes and
Paul Thomas Anderson.
“I
didn’t grow up thinking I was a particularly visual
person,” she says. “I don’t draw or anything. But the
older I’ve gotten, the more visual I’ve realized that I
am. I really need to know what the frame is. I want to
see the picture so I know where to stand in the
picture.”
On set,
Moore works closely with the cinematographer and camera
operator, studying storyboards and sometimes asking for
a sense of how the scene might be edited, all to get a
sense of how her work fits into the grander scheme.
Balancing technique and raw emotion is a process she
finds more exhilarating than cumbersome.
“One of
the most exciting things about filmmaking is the
technical limitations,” she says, “knowing that I have
to come up with a performance within a technical box.
It’s not just about, ‘Well I got it, now you should get
it.’ A performance in a vacuum is nothing. It only
exists in a movie.” |
