Tom Kalin’s long-awaited new feature is based on the award-winning book of the same title, and like his earlier and influential SWOON draws its material from a real life crime story tinged with sexual undertones. Beginning in 1946 and spanning almost 30 years, it tells the incredible story of Barbara Daly (Moore, CHILDREN OF MEN), an aspiring socialite who marries above her class to Brooks Baekeland (Dillane, KLIMT), heir to the Bakelite plastics fortune. Theirs is an unsteady match, and friction between the couple is compounded by the birth of their son, Tony (the brilliant Redmayne), who develops an unnaturally close relationship with his mother. The family’s pursuit of the good life brings them from New York to Europe, and we see their rise and fall in glamorous locations in Paris, Cadaques, Mallorca and London. Sexually confused, mocked by his father and near suffocated by his mother’s neediness, Tony’s mental health begins to deteriorate, and the family dynamics take a violent turn.
Haynes’ dramatic recreation of Fifties America is both a homage to one of the masters of the melodrama, Douglas Sirk, and a remarkable film in its own right. Julianne Moore is at her best as a housewife who discovers her family are far from the Rockwellian ideal.
