Far From Heaven
Review
by : Eric Barker
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Starring:
Julianne Moore (Cathy Whitaker), Dennis Quaid
(Frank Whitaker), Dennis Haysbert (Raymond Deagan),
Patricia Clarkson (Eleonor Fine)
Written, and Directed
by: Todd Haynes
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 The
world of a complacent housewife in 1957 Connecticut is turned
inside-out by her husband’s crisis of sexual identity,
and by community reaction to her friendship with an African-American
man.
A dazzlingly
crafted tribute to the movies of cult director Douglas Sirk;
a subtle deconstruction of Hollywood esthetics in the fifties;
and a transcendent exploration of middle-class American consciousness.
Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven is an astonishing,
multi-layered film that should transform his critical reputation,
taking him beyond the limbo of “talented” and
“original” into the front rank of American filmmakers.
On the
surface, the film looks just like a lush Technicolor production
of the Eisenhower era. From the stylish costumes, to the color
coordinated interiors, to the symbolically blowing and changing
leaves of a New England fall, Haynes deftly recreates the
atmosphere of a Lana Turner soap opera, an earnest world of
well-kept households and a profoundly held belief that such
a thing as normalcy exits outside of custom. But because this
is the work of a former semiotics student, the film’s
carefully constructed on-screen world vibrates with a self-awareness
those old melodramas never possessed. The highly controlled
production and costume design in Far From Heaven
soon becomes a visual metaphor for repression, lending powerful
irony to Hayne’s exploration of our greatest decade
of conformity, the Fifties, and to the film’s immersion
in the pain, confusion and heartbreak caused by a society
with such a limited scope of reference.
Hayne’s
tortured cast of characters quickly exhibit the neuroses beneath
their social straight-jackets. Julianne Moore is simply brilliant
as Cathy, a white woman enraptured by her own community image
as the ideal fifties housewife, always primly coiffed, doting
on a husband who is consumed with work, frequently wondering
why her sex life is a dim shadow of that enjoyed by her friends.
Cathy is clueless, but not stupid: the film is going to be
about her grueling journey toward a new kind of consciousness,
one that will leave her wiser, though not necessarily happier.
Moore portrays Cathy with a delicate balance of compassion
and deep intelligence; if she was not so completely subsumed
in the character, her performance would verge on satire, but
Moore's ultimate sympathy for Cathy allows the character to
emerge as the frightened, confused representative of an entire
decade, a person who has every reason to believe her life
is the way of the world only to discover that, no, things
are just a little more complex than that.
This is
the genius of Far From Heaven: characters stand-in
for ideas, but at the same time they are fully realized human
beings. The conventional tropes of melodrama are used with
flair and a wink, yet Hayne's is deadly serious about making
them work dramatically as well, and so he does. Before long,
Far From Heaven is drawing out the subtext of many
fifties movies, baldly stating what could only be suggested
then: Cathy’s husband Frank is gay (or, given the fact
they have two children, more likely bi-sexual), a hopelessly
conflicted man caught red-handed, after years of performing
up to par, in the wretched act of being himself.
The ever
undervalued Dennis Quaid is wonderful as Frank, subtly, deftly
conveying how it feels to be trapped in a world that views
your innermost desires as reprehensible and immoral. Frank
is losing his grip on reality with determination, sinking
into alcoholism, ignoring his children out of guilt, leaving
his wife no choice but to confide in a mute outsider, the
family‘s black gardener Raymond. But this turns out
to be no more of an option for Cathy than playing the suffering
housewife; like many a community pillar before and after her,
she learns that her role in the world dominates her, not the
other way around, and that the most innocent gesture can have
destructive consequences.
Some contemporary
viewers will no doubt be put off by the openly melodramatic
tone of the film, although melodrama is really just another
storytelling style, and in the hands of a filmmaker like Haynes,
a startling one. Far From Heaven explores how surface
appearances and the codes of the everyday world are merely
masks covering the vast undercurrents of life, undercurrents
which have been rejected and suppressed by the majority. The
film begins in a celebration of 1950s surfaces, so richly
conveyed we seem to be observing life on another planet (and
in some ways we are). But then Haynes unveils the all-too-human
impulses that are being stifled in this neatly ordered world
of dinner parties and two-point-five children. When it all
begins to fall apart, what else could burst free but the raw
emotion of melodrama, the soul-shattering forces of unassuageable
guilt and unrequited desire?
Far
From Heaven isn’t melodramatic so much as it is
operatic, mapping an underworld of emotional turmoil that
still exists for us all, and perhaps always will, as long
as we live in highly organized societies. That underworld
may seem disconnected from the average viewer, because the
rules have changed, the repressed areas of life have shifted.
It is no longer taboo for a black man to have lunch with a
white woman (at least, not in my town), nor is it unthinkable
for a father of two to come out of the closet and stop hiding
from himself (again, in my town, anyway). But taboo is a void
that must and shall be filled, part of the way social orders
define and protect their boundaries. The ultimate effect of
Far From Heaven, like any classical drama, is to transcend
the particular taboos of the world it creates by calling into
question all repression, and all social surfaces, no matter
what they signify.
Gorgeous
cinematography by Edward Lachman, a perfect recreation of
the Technicolor-noir palette in Douglas Sirk’s soapy
extravaganzas, with their elegantly moving camera and slashes
of primary colors in the midst of shadowy rooms. The sets
and costumes, by Mark Friedberg and Sandy Powell, respectively,
are breathtaking, while the overripe music score by Elmer
Bernstein is a masterpiece of substance over style.
A beautiful,
highly literate (and cinema-literate) film that works on multiple
levels, one of the year‘s very best.
Notes:
Hayne’s
major in college, semiotics, is the study of signs and codes,
the meaning beneath surfaces. Cf. his other films: Poison
(1991) an anthology of stories by Jean Genet; Safe
(1995), also with Julianne Moore, also examining the concerns
of the middle class in metaphorical tones; and Velvet
Goldmine (1998), about the world of 70s glam rock.
Steven
Soderbergh and George Clooney were among the film’s
several underwriters.
Costume
designer Powell also did the massive wardrobe for Gangs of
New York.
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