I wanted to run home and write an entry on our seemingly ceaseless obsession with wealth and celebrity.
That's how I felt after wasting 96 minutes on Tom Kalin's meandering Julianne Moore vehicle, Savage Grace. It wasn't until leaving the theatre that I remembered that when I'd read the book on which the movie's based, I'd had a similar sinking feeling.
It seems to me that there are some stories that do not warrant telling. And the story of the Baekeland family and its pitiable dramas may just be one of them. Frankly, there's not much there there.
Like the murder at the end, so many of the things that ought to be newsworthy—incest, partner swapping, a father stealing a son's girlfriend, drug addiction, mental illness, social isolation... the list is too endless—have little or no weight because they mean so little to the characters as depicted. And that brings me to my larger point.
If a family of extraordinary wealth has a few petty squabbles, writers and filmmakers can't run fast enough to translate these into "art" yet if we're honest with ourselves, it seems to me that they (and we, the audience for such dross) must admit that the real attraction is not to the particulars of the story in question, but rather to the wealth and status of its key players.
How else does one explain a reality series devoted to the tedious kitchen intrigues of Jessica Simpson or Whitney Houston, to name just two examples.
As with much of his previous work, Mr. Kalin seems drawn to the buzz that surrounds his story, more than the story itself. And therein lies the rub.
When a filmmaker (or author, or playwright, what have you) chooses material based solely on its sensational quality, the end result is bound to be a tiresome affair. Because none of the characters depicted have any life breathed into them in any human compelling way.
I started this post saying I wanted to write something about how some stories ought not to be told. That's honestly how I felt after seeing Savage Grace.
But then I remembered Shakespeare. Shakespeare's masterful storytelling was certainly not compromised by his choice of stories of already enormous notoriety. He re-told the story of Hamlet from a point of view that had never before been attempted. The same for Macbeth and Julius Caesar. These were popular plots that had already been claimed as "newsworthy."
So I guess it's not really fair to chide Mr. Kalin for his choice of subject-matter. Any story, in the proper hands, can be made compelling.
Great storytelling need not have at its core a great story. It need only have a great story teller. Some of the great works of literature—Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Crime and Punishment, to name just three—can easily be distilled and outlined in a way that would make them sound like a sappy melodrama, like a soap opera.
It's not the story that matters really, it's how you tell it. Sadly today, in a culture where packaging trumps substance, and films and books are marketed before they're even written, the tales we're told often wind up signifying nothing... full of sound and fury... and told by an idiot.
Dare I say, ass-backwards?
