Overall Rating
  Awesome: 51.38%
Worth A Look: 33.03%
Average: 4.59%
Pretty Bad: 7.34%
Total Crap: 3.67%
9 reviews, 55 user ratings
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| Far from Heaven |
by Rob Gonsalves
"Beautifully crafted but seldom rises above homage."
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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 people even mind their language, save for one meant-to-be-startling moment when an anguished character 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 — or now, sadly). 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 and astringent 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.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=6299&reviewer=416
originally posted: 12/27/06 15:32:31
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2002 Vancouver Film Festival. For more in the 2002 Vancouver Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2005 SXSW Film Festival. For more in the 2005 South By Southwest Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
08-Nov-2002 (PG-13)
DVD: 01-Apr-2003
UK
N/A
Australia
06-Feb-2003
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