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2 articles from 2008

29 May 2008 2:01 PM, PDT | From avclub.com | See recent The AV Club news

Based on Natalie Robins' non-fiction book, Savage Grace tells the tragic story of Barbara Baekeland, a middle-class woman who married into the Bakelite plastics fortune, but allowed her insecurities to poison her familial relationships and lead to murder. There's no better actress to play her than Julianne Moore, whose work in Far From Heaven, Safe, and The Hours reveals a talent for suffocated housewives, especially of the upper-crust Eisenhower-era variety. Her exceptionally nuanced performance brings a measure of compassion to a monstrous woman, revealing her heartbreaks and contradictions, all tied to a deep vulnerability that goes hand-in-glove with her pathological behavior. Savage Grace should have the force of Greek tragedy, but Kalin's chamber drama feels curiously stifling and flat, and Moore's volatile turn isn't enough to quicken its pulse. Draped in heavy period trappings, the film opens in late-'40s Manhattan, where Barbara and her distant husband Brooks (Stephen Dillane

Scott Tobias

27 May 2008 9:01 PM, PDT | From avclub.com | See recent The AV Club news

Though she won a Daytime Emmy in 1988 for her dual role as a pair of half-sisters on As The World Turns, Julianne Moore didn't gain a foothold in cinema until she was well into her 30s, but she quickly made up for lost time. In rapid succession, she established herself as a screen actor with formidable range and daring, giving memorable turns in Robert Altman's Short Cuts, Louis Malle's Vanya On 42nd Street, and Todd Haynes' Safe, which revealed a penchant for playing stifled upper-class housewives. Moore worked with Altman again on Cookie's Fortune, and took on more roles with Haynes (Far From Heaven, I'm Not There), Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia), and her husband, Bart Freundlich (The Myth Of Fingerprints, Trust The Man). Though dramatic turns have earned her four Oscar nominations—for Boogie Nights and The End Of The Affair, and, in the same year,

Scott Tobias

2 articles from 2008