SAVAGE GRACE/PLASTIC PEOPLE

It is a truism that great success often begets tragedy. Still it is shocking to realise how quickly the celebrations over the invention of plastic in the early 1900s led to incest and murder.

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The plastic in the news here is Bakelite, the touchy feeling stuff that was invented in 1912 by a Belgian born American called Leo Baekeland, paving the way for a generation of revolutionary phones and radios.

So far so wonderful. The trouble starts some thirty years later in New York with his grandson Brooks, played here by a very convincing Brit, Stephen Dillane, who finds his good fortune hard to bear.

Or rather it starts with Brooks' lamentable marriage to a low class but ambitious red head, Barbara Daly, given compelling life by Julianne Moore.

This was a couple that even the best of Bakelite could never kept together and as soon as they have a son, Tony, even they begin to see their folly.

By the time the boy is a teenager, otherwise known as the scary Londoner, Eddie Redmayne, they shatter like cheap glass.

Brooks takes off, ably assisted by his ambivalent son's one and only girlfriend, leaving his wife and Tony to comfort each other as best they can.

Aided and abetted in their hour of need by Hugh Dancy, stepping out here as a daring bi-sexual in order to be able to help both mother and son.

And goodness, this trio have a energetic, if manic, stab at having fun together, with Mum asking if her lad will still find her attractive when her tits start to sag and offering to help manually when his gay desires no longer make him hard, while Dancy dances to whatever turn the misguided pair want to play.

Yes, this is the unsavoury Bakelite legacy, and it gets worse. As the LA Times noted, "It's tough to think of another film in which sex between a mother and her son is not necessarily the worst thing that happens."

Indeed, like the best of true stories, its extremes go far beyond fiction. If someone made up such happenings, no one would believe them. But, as facts, they made riveting and sobering viewing, for anyone with the strength to look deep into troubled souls..

As the records show, in 1972 the muddled Tony stabbed his mercurial mother to death and, believe it or not, went from that bad to far worse..

The trailer on the film's trailer conveys the skewed nature of this unusual love story precisely.

The film opens in Britain’s key cities on Friday, July 11, 2008.

Posted July 1, 2008. Revised July 7, 2008.