director/screenwriter
Todd Haynes
producers
Jody Patton
Christine Vachon
cinematographer
Edward Lachman
music
Elmer Bernstein
editor
James Lyons
cast
Julianne Moore (Cathy Whitaker)
Dennis Quaid (Frank Whitaker)
Dennis Haysbert (Raymond Deagan)
Patricia Clarkson (Eleanor Fine)
Viola Davis (Sybil)
James Rebhorn (Dr. Bowman)
Bette Henritze (Mrs. Leacock)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 107m
u.s.
release: November 8,
2002
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other todd
haynes films
reviewed on this website:
- safe
- superstar:
the karen carpenter story
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For those who complain that
Hollywood doesn't make movies like they used to, writer-director
Todd Haynes has gone to great trouble to make a movie like they
used to -- Far from Heaven, a melodrama set in 1957 that
almost could've been made in 1957. Haynes, whose style
has ranged from the stark white of Safe
(1995) to the kaleidoscopic glam-rock glitter of Velvet Goldmine
(1998), ties himself this time to a rigorous form of classical
filmmaking. The lighting, the costumes, the stilted dialogue,
the kids who call their parents "sir" and "ma'am"
-- Haynes seems to curl up and snuggle inside the sheer repression
of the '50s style. The characters even mind their language, save
for one meant-to-be-startling moment when an anguished man lets
fly with the F-word.
It's an obsessive triumph of
design and tribute, beautifully acted by Julianne Moore and Dennis
Quaid as the central embattled married couple, but it exists
in an uneasy zone between homage and parody. Haynes obviously
means us to join in the sorrow, to empathize with Moore's Cathy
Whitaker, who develops tender feelings for black gardener Raymond
(Dennis Haysbert), and Quaid's Frank Whitaker, a deeply closeted
gay man who's submerged his desires thoroughly enough to sire
two children and have an outwardly ideal marriage. But this stuff
was somehow more fun in the '50s, when interracial and same-sex
love dared not speak their names, and directors had to sneak
them in via coded subtexts that only hip audiences (or today's
modern audiences) could decode.
Quaid is intensely moving as
the tortured Frank, especially when the poor man conscientiously
seeks to "cure" his condition, growling "I'm gonna
beat this thing" as though homosexuality were cancer
and simply required the hetero equivalent of chemotherapy (heterotherapy?
not an uncommon concept back then, actually). But Far from
Heaven would probably sink without Julianne Moore, who stampedes
towards challenges that lesser actresses would shrink from. She
nails the surface of Cathy -- presentable housewife who lives
only for Frank, the kids, and a well-appointed home -- and somehow
manages to read Hayne's intentionally strictured dialogue as
if a human being could actually say it. But when she falls for
Raymond (Haysbert does fine, tender work), Cathy comes to understand
the power of forbidden desires over her husband. She's willing
to forgive him his trespasses, even if he forgives neither her
nor himself.
Moore takes you along on a
fully developed emotional arc; this is an old-school women's
weepie, like the Douglas Sirk soapers (Imitation of Life,
Written on the Wind, and especially All That Heaven
Allows) Haynes adores enough to have made this valentine
to them. The formulation is a bit too neat, though: homosexuality
for the man, a Negro lover for the woman, both marooned in the
intolerance of the '50s yet depicted with 20/20 hindsight 45
years later (as if the same conflicts today wouldn't also wreck
a marriage). A less generous reading of Far from Heaven
might be that the openly gay director is tweaking the sanctity
of marriage, an institution that today hardly needs to be exposed,
what with its high rate of failure. Then, too, Haynes could be
capturing the moment in America, right before the turbulent '60s,
when people began to realize that a union founded on repression
is founded on nothing.
I applaud Haynes' achievement
as a loving and radiant throwback, a true oxymoron that appreciates
the lush surface of the '50s (or '50s cinema, anyway) while not
remotely wishing for a return to the social dictates of that
era. Yet what's missing is the shameless emotional punch we associate
with the old melodramas; Haynes, as brilliant as he sometimes
can be, is simply too distant a director to pull out the stops
and wring our tears. Far from Heaven comes to seem more
of a cinematic position paper, or a postmodern stunt, than a
drama (compared to something like Blue Velvet, which works
similar territory to overpowering effect, it looks rather pallid).
Haynes gets the surface, and the passions crawling underneath
it, but that's all he gets.
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