Far From Heaven Review
by Karina Montgomery (karina AT cinerina DOT com)November 27th, 2002
Far From Heaven
Full Price Feature
Far From Heaven is a delightfully complex movie made in the style of the simplistic, idealistic technicolor 1950's film. It is not a film about the '50's, though it is set in 1957, and some of the tension and isolation in this story could only have happened in that time. It is an authentic 50's movie, lifted through time, which could never have been made in the era after which it is styled. The content that writer/director Todd Haynes' script addresses would never have seen the light of celluloid. His thesis appears to be this: if this film had been made back then, in the year it is set, what would it have been like? So he meticulously styled his script, from titles to dialogue to music (Elmer Bernstein, also of Cat Women of the Moon, The Ten Commandments, and The Great Escape, and everything in-between) to props to habits to everything, and dropped in his Ingredient X of the Future.
No, I'm not talking about sci fi aliens and whatnot - I am talking about real problems that surely existed in that era but were never addressed by Hollywood. Real problems we address on network TV every night, in our "enlightened" era of today. His actors are like puppets in a petri dish. My companion (from whom I get many of my best analyses) compared Haynes to J.W. Waterhouse, the Victorian artist who painted in the Renaissance style, classical figures doing things never depicted in the classical period, be it deeply kissing or drinking coffee, or exhibiting depth. Haynes painstakingly reproduces the style, the feel of these films now 45 years in the can, with amazing depth.
Enough cannot be said about the visual detail - yellowish technicolor, flat lighting, "magazine" homes, scrubbed and golem-like children, put on the shelf when not needed, projected street scenes seen from inside a randomly rocking car. Even finer are the more visceral details. Cigarettes have no filters, those dresses really weren't flattering at all (just the mockups later at the natural waist evoking but not reproducing the style), the alabaster gleam of the simplest bakelite accessory (replaced by plastic later). At night, streets and people are lit with the garish comic book colors of Dick Tracy. The characters don't rush to the phone in order to get to it before the answering machine goes off, and the caller lets it ring, knowing it takes time to get through that split level ranch home to the kitchen extension. Cocktails are imbibed, sex is discussed, and it all feels so polished. Even the dialogue has that McCarthyism gleam to it - flat and formal and somehow devoid. It's not the actual 1950's, after all, it is Hollywood's two-dimensional 1950's. Bernstein got his start in this era, and his score swoops and swells and traipses through the moods of the story.
It's not just a production design hat trick, either, though it could feel like that in the mild and pleasant prologue. He does not pull a Pleasantville, where you drop modern people into a past (and fake) world, thereby "improving" that past with our "modern" attitudes. Instead, he lets the world remain as it was, with no sea change of modernity. The whole feel and tone informs the reactions of the film - it is harder and harder for modern audiences to properly suspend their disbelief and remember more innocent times, when Boris Karloff as Frankenstein actually did scare the pants off of the audience. We can know it intellectually, and watch smugly as a film character screams and hides while the comically iconic monster trudges along, but we have trouble feeling what that character would have felt like. Haynes' unique palette informs our own reactions; we are more immersed in this shiny glowing past by feeling it so richly. By relying on a character (Julianne Moore as Kathy Whittaker) who believes in that world so fully, that the resulting shock of the events as they unfurl is more keenly felt by us.
Moore carries the brunt of the film, both in selling us this vivid aqua reality but also in dealing with the effects wrought by the actions of the two supporting men, her husband Frank (Dennis Quaid) and her gardener, Raymond (Dennis Haybert), who is (whispering) black. In true '50's style the wife takes the heat of public scorn (or shields others from it) for what these men offer to the story, and the level of destruction and havoc in her life could only have happened in this unique point in history. To tell you more is to ruin it. The turmoil is made the more interesting by the aforementioned palpable empathy he creates with his tone. Kathy is utterly unprepared for such events in her life, and we feel most keenly how alone and how hopeless she must feel, isolated in 1957 with these burdens.
It's a beaufiful, thoughtful film, one that has to be seen and felt to truly appreciate.
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These reviews (c) 2002 Karina Montgomery. Please feel free to forward but just credit the reviewer in the text. Thanks.
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