FAR FROM HEAVEN/ ***1/2

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Far From Heaven

***1/2

Cinema Reviews - Week of March 21, 2003

Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 12A. USA. 107 minutes. Written and directed by Todd Haynes. Starring Julianne Moore, Dennis Quaid, Dennis Haysbert, Patricia Clarkson, Viola Davis, James Rebhorn, Bette Henritze, Michael Gaston, Ryan Ward, Lindsay Andretta, Jordan Puryear, Kyle Timothy Smith, Celia Weston.

Most of the press around "Far from Heaven" has been going on about how it looks exactly like those Douglas Sirk melodramas from the 1950s. The similarity has been exaggerated; this isn't a flawless recreation, and the Sirk movies had tighter shots with less camera movement, and fewer colours, more highly concentrated. This new film, directed by Todd Haynes and photographed by Edward Lachman, is fluid and clear, and yet the colours are limited, and there are striking effects, like the way moonlight casts through the window with an elegantly otherworldly blue. It looks how it's supposed to look -- a film made in 2002 that is a clear tribute to Sirk.

The story, too, takes elements from the Sirk pictures and goes where he couldn't at the time. Like "Imitation of Life", it explores racial segregation, and the way its hatefulness was expressed with such genteel denial in the suburbs of America at the time. And as has been pointed out by pretty much everybody, it resembles "All That Heaven Allows", in that it is about a woman whose relationship with her gardener causes class controversy with the neighbourhood gossips and forces her to reevaluate just how much she can stand the values of her cosy life. "Far from Heaven" takes its explorations further by combining the romance and race issues, and by throwing homosexuality into the mix.

Julianne Moore is the star, playing a housewife famous among the locals. Her husband (Dennis Quaid) is a successful advertising exec, and the couple are known for appearing in a popular lifestyle ad for his company -- they're Mr. and Mrs. Magnatech! Moore is celebrated for being kindly to service people and negroes; her friends smile at the traits, taking them as ways to nobly score reputation points, but as the movie begins, she seems to be getting more sincere about them each day, and that's just crazy. She doesn't mind having thoughtful conversations with the strapping black man who does the garden (Dennis Haysbert), and did you hear, there's a rumour she had lunch with him? What not even the gossips know is that she's not only falling for a dark workman, but dealing with Quaid, who is losing it at work and coming to terms with being attracted to men. Of course, he promises to fight the thing: "I'm gonna see the doctor -- I know it's wrong, it makes me feel despicable!"

Using more or less the speech, manner, values and music cues of the 1950s films, the film is fascinating and eventually astonishingly impacting. I've always been a fan of soupy old movies from the era "Far from Heaven" is referencing. They have dialogue in which conversation trails off into perfectly proper speechmaking at convenient moments, where characters will suddenly look all overcome in the middle of casual talking and look off into the distance to bring up something Highly Emotional. Whether you see this kind of thing as soap opera, or sophisticated satire, its appearance is so stiffly earnest that after a while the style becomes a given, and the content develops surprising power. We simply forget about the oddness, and become struck by emotion.

What I think Haynes is playing at, basically, is making the kind of movie Sirk might have made with the resources of today. Something set in the same time and place as Sirk's most famous works, but without restrictions from Hollywood censors and with a little more technological freedom. Remember also that resources include humans, and much of "Far from Heaven" revolves around Julianne Moore. She appears in so many period pieces because her face has timeless beauty and sadness; the love and loss in her face inspires gazing, like we're looking at an old painting. When Moore plays characters stuck into putting happy faces on lives that are going nowhere, we sit up and pay attention rather than rolling our eyes.

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