Barbara Baekeland (Julianne Moore) is the matron of an intensely dysfunctional family in Tom Kalin's true-crime movie Savage Grace. (IFC/Maximum Films)

“Don’t be tedious,” is the favoured expression of the bored and rich cocktail crowd at The Stork Club in the wry (and rye-filled) Savage Grace. But it’s hard, isn’t it, not to be tedious, darling, in 1950s high society New York, when you are Barbara Baekeland (Julianne Moore), wife of Brooks (Stephen Dillane), heir to the Bakelite plastic fortune. You might need to climb in the back of another man’s car just to get a rise out of your somnambulant hubby. And jetting between Majorca, Paris, London and New York, looking drop-dead (Oops! Spoiler!) gorgeous in Chanel suits and speaking in the mannered tones of a George Cukor heroine — why, it’s positively exhausting.

Director Tom Kalin’s first full-length feature since his last true crime outing Swoon (1992) is touched with camp; there’s potential here for a cult following. (Or at least a good Halloween costume: red beach kaftan, cigarette, Diana Vreeland voice and a date in a bespoke-suit bearing a kitchen knife — ladies, you’re good to go!) As shot by Kalin and hugely talented cinematographer Juan Miguel Azpiroz, the decades-spanning portrait of events leading up to Baekeland’s murder in 1972 is as physically glorious as its heroine, with historically accurate set design, right down to the curve of a mid-century modern couch leg. But eventually, the archness and the artifice sap the film of needed dramatic heft. And when a story is as horrifying as this real-life mess — based on the book Savage Grace: The True Story of Fatal Relations in a Rich and Famous American Family by Natalie Robins and Steven M.L. Aronson — you shouldn’t be distracted by the furniture.

Born Barbra Daly, Baekeland married up and spent her life coasting on her beauty — given full expression by Moore, with flame-red hair and matching dresses — in circles that were always just a little closed to her. Barbara’s nouveau-riche entitlement never quite flies; unctuous and nervous, she doesn’t exactly fit in, trying to keep up with her husband’s to-the-manor-born arrogance. He, at least, knows the language of the upper classes, despite being another odd, off-kilter person in a film rich with them.

Brooks is both angered and bewildered by his own lack of ambition, and seethes at his wife for her blunt awkwardness. In Paris, she corners a literary scholar with the party-killing question: “Tell me, is it true: Was Proust a homosexual? Qu’est-ce que tu penses?”

When Barbara falters this way, Kalin roots around for our empathy, but those moments when she is not simply monstrous are few and far between. On screen, anyway, Barbara is a first-class narcissist, either a neglectful mother or the opposite, a mom who takes “attachment parenting” to its farthest, most unappetizing extreme. The object of her smothering is son Tony, first a precocious child (Barney Clark) who delights his mother as much as her stockings and handbags do — though her stockings can’t fetch Mommy an Aspirin and bring her breakfast in bed, cuddle included.

Tony Baekeland (Eddie Redmayne, foreground) becomes involved in a complicated relationship with his best friend, Black Jake (Unax Ugalde). (IFC/Maximum Films)

Grown-up Tony (Eddie Redmayne) inherits his parents’ genetic malaise. While vacationing on “the continent,” he sleeps with both sexes, but tasting every type of pleasure doesn’t necessarily bring joy. Redmayne is an unusual creature, with a marvelous wan freckle-face — part Carrot Top, part Richie Cunningham, part platypus — but he plays it flat and realist opposite Moore’s melodrama. They are both good performances, but don’t seem to belong in the same film; are we in a meticulous, desert-dry period piece or are we in a modern teen sulk-fest?

The one woman whom Tony brings home — a Spanish beauty named Blanca (Elena Anaya) — quickly shacks up with Daddy. Heartbroken by the abandonment and left to their own devices, mother and son indulge in a long period of substance abuse and bed-hopping. She sleeps with her gay best friend, who also sleeps with Tony, who is sleeping with his male roommate, and eventually, Barbara climbs into a bed that includes her son. Kalin doesn’t treat the incest theme lightly; there is a lot of sex in Savage Grace, but nothing is sexy. All the play between people is about power and control, not love.

There must have been some reason to tell this story other than prurience, but what is it? The loneliness of a rich wife whose husband stews in bitterness — Dillane gives the man a great sense of shame that’s soured into rage — carries some poignancy, but ultimately, the family is entirely unrelatable, their malaise too vaguely defined. Savage Grace comes to seem like some kind of historic mother-son Sid and Nancy — nihilism with style.

Kalin circles close to the psychological disaster that is the Baekeland family, and then retreats to polish the film’s surface. It didn’t have to be this way. Moore played a stylized figure once before, in Todd Haynes’s tribute to Douglas Sirk, Far from Heaven. But in that film, the impeccable design didn’t deplete the tragedy. In Savage Grace, Baekeland is only ever a fiend, and even she deserves greater understanding.

Savage Grace opens in Toronto on July 4, with other cities to follow.

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.