Far From Heaven Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)November 26th, 2002
Jonathan Richards
FAR FROM HEAVEN
Years ago there was a movie called "Star" about the career of the actress Gertrude Lawrence, with Julie Andrews playing the legendary diva. My father, who had seen them both, thought that Julie had it all over Gertie. I mention this because, while it comes down to a matter of taste, it is certainly possible for the copy to outshine the original.
Todd Haynes, whose previous feature was the lush glitter-rock tribute "Velvet Goldmine", has created a pastiche of the Douglas Sirk melodramas of the 1950s that tugged at the heartstrings, stiffened the upper lip, and were probably responsible for the invention of the Kleenex Pocket Pack. Sirk, wearing the straightjacket of '50s morality and the Hayes Production Office Code, filmed such classics of the genre as "Magnificent Obsession", "Imitation of Life" (the Lana Turner remake), and, most pointedly for our purposes here, the 1955 "All that Heaven Allows", in which suburban housewife Jane Wyman falls for her hunky gardener, Rock Hudson, and sets tongue wagging all over town. That's the one Haynes has picked up on, but he's retouched it with themes that could only be hinted at back in the Eisenhower era. In Haynes's version, the housewife's gardener is black, and her husband is gay. Nobody was gay in American movies until the '60s, when Don Murray battled his unspeakable demons in "Advise and Consent". And television viewers of that era remember when Harry Belafonte put his hand on Petula Clark's shoulder and the sponsors all pulled their advertising.
The first thing that's apparent is that Haynes has utterly mastered the form to which he's paying tribute. His movie opens with rich sensory foreplay as the camera glides gently down through gaudy autumn leaves to a suburban Hartford neighborhood where freshly-washed station wagons ply quiet streets and children ride their bicycles, cocooned in the reassuring embrace of a soaring, sobbing Elmer Bernstein score - the same Elmer Bernstein who was winning Oscars for his movie music back in those distant days.
His heroine is Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore), the socialite mother of two (a boy and a girl, natch) and wife of prominent businessman Frank Whitaker (Dennis Quaid). Cathy is Pat Nixon as played by June Cleaver, and the remarkable Moore gives her to us straight, an ice sculpture with a heart of pure gold who wants and expects nothing more nor less than that her world should continue to give her what it has always promised. But almost from the beginning little scraps of apple peelings begin to litter the landscape of her Eden. Her husband is detained by the cops (a misunderstanding); her scarf blows away (a gust of wind); her little boy uses improper language ("aw, jeez...."); a strange black man shows up in her yard (the deceased gardener's son). But these are mere harbingers of the sordid shocks to come.
It is Cathy's discovery of her husband's sexual deviance that rocks her world to its foundations. But those foundations are strong. She's willing to stand by her man while he seeks counseling to cure the condition, but from our perspective we know what the psychiatrist (James Rebhorn) hints at, that it may be neither curable nor a disease. More shocking to our emancipated sensibilities is the movie's other seismic theme. Cathy's 1957 Hartford suburb is one that breathes a racism as clearly delineated as the two-toned pastel colors on her Bel-Air wagon. When she sees her new gardener, Raymond Deagan (Dennis Haysbert of TV's "24") at an art gallery with his little girl, Cathy scandalizes the burghers by going over and talking with him. As befits the form, Raymond is an intellectual in gardener's clothing who instructs her on Joan Miró, and as the troubles in her life mount their friendship ripens. They both seem a little thick about the effect their innocent companionship will have on the community in which they have always lived, but that's how movie plots work, and this is proudly and self-assuredly a movie.
It's a marvelous movie, from its sumptuous design (Mark Friedberg, "The Ice Storm") to its perfect crinolined dresses (Sandy Powell) and its balletic camera movements by Edward Lachman. The performances are wonderful, though Quaid seems less at home in the period than the others. Haysbert brings a gentle dignity and stature to his role, and Patricia Clarkson is splendid in the role of Cathy's catty best friend. But it is Moore's performance that the picture breathes through, and she is marvelous.
"Far from Heaven" shows us people trapped in a world from which there seems to be no escape. From a half-century's perspective, we now know something they couldn't know then -- that there was a way out of the Fifties. It was the Sixties. That didn't turn out to be a very perfect fix, and it left plenty of problems in place, including plenty of its own devising. Haynes gives us a look at all of this, and reminds us where we've been, and where we need to go.
FAR FROM HEAVEN
Written and Directed by Todd Haynes
PG-13 107 minutes
DeVargas
Four Chiles
Todd Haynes, whose previous feature was the lush glitter-rock tribute "Velvet Goldmine", has created a pastiche of the Douglas Sirk melodramas of the 1950s ("Magnificent Obsession", "All that Heaven Allows") that tugged at the heartstrings, stiffened the upper lip, and were probably responsible for the invention of the Kleenex Pocket Pack. And he's improved upon the master. With a superb performance by Julianne Moore at the core of this period piece, and terrific help from actors like Dennis Haysbert (TV's "24"), Dennis Quaid, and Patricia Clarkson, and a great production staff, Haynes plays powerfully on themes of homosexuality and racism that could barely be hinted at a half century ago.
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