The New Nation - Internet Edition

New York, Agencies

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,' which opened Friday in limited release, 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 facade 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 jewellery 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 post-war 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!"