#47 — Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002)
Far From Heaven is an exercise in adoration. It is an unabashed, spellbound, swooning tribute to the technicolor melodramas of the 1950’s, particularly those directed by Douglas Sirk. The titles alone reverberate with grandiloquence: Magnificent Obsession, Written on the Wind, A Time to Love and a Time to Die, and the film that served as the most direct inspiration for Far From Heaven, All That Heaven Allows. Sirk’s films are famous for washing the screen with vibrant colors, sending the actors into teary-eyed overdrive with anguished dialogue, and approaching social issues with a forceful earnestness that was deeply well-intentioned and hopelessly stodgy, even for that era. Judging from his own film, writer-director Todd Haynes loves all these things, and he loves them equally. He also loves the campiness of them, the element that best accounts for the films’ appeal to those with more modern movie sensibilities. The most astounding accomplishment of Haynes’s film is the way it draws all these disparate, even competing qualities together. Every bit of this film is a knowing send-up and a sincere celebration, spoofery and homage simultaneously.

Haynes stylistic duplication is complete, including setting his film in the proper era. It takes place in 1950’s suburbia, with a housewife keeping a home in suitable order for a glossy magazine layout while her husband goes off to work in his executive suite, toiling with his necktied colleagues to sell the new 1958 Magnatech television sets. The veneer of American perfection hides inner turmoil, and soon both partners in the couple find themselves driven by secret desires deemed forbidden by the smothering, controlling society they operate within. Sirk could only go so far making movies under the strictures of the Hayes Code, but Haynes can hit on topics that were fully omitted or included only as subtext previously. Interracial romance and homosexual longing trigger the conflict here, rattling the glossy, picturesque world of the film with weighty credibility. Sirk could get by wringing drama out of a socialite falling in love with a lowly gardener. Haynes knows it now takes more, and by incorporating love affairs that would have a genuinely seismic effect on a judgmental, insular community at that time, he reinvigorates the high emotions of a genre that can now seem hopelessly hoary. The affected raised eyebrow of a busybody neighbor who thinks she spots an illicit dalliance takes on an additional level of menace because Haynes builds his onscreen heartbreak around social worries that really matter, and had, at the time, devastating life and death consequences.

The actors need to walk the fine line that Haynes draws. They balance mannered adherence to the florid emoting of their predecessors while also finding ways to delve into the reality of the situations, of these lives upended. Dennis Quaid plays the sterling, stalwart man of the house, tipping back cocktails to soothe the pain of denying his attraction to men. Previously, the best performances of Quaid’s career were flavored with swagger. He emanated the confidence of man who, when pressed, could extricate himself from any tight situation, perhaps with nothing more than the gradual cracking open of a wide, wildboy smile. It’s revelatory to see him turn that enduring charisma into a rapidly crumbling mask, the pained self-betrayal harshly emerging from underneath. As his wife, Julianne Moore is astounding. Watching her balance her performance on the precipice between overblown and grounded is like staring intently at an ever-shifting puzzle that is nearly impossible to fathom. In defiance of conventional wisdom about what makes for good acting, every moment of her time onscreen is a transparent choice. You always see her acting. And yet it is that very characteristic of her work that makes it riveting. It even becomes what makes her performance so honest and believable, because, in the end, it’s the only proper way to be completely devoted to the world of her film.

Haynes gets all the details right in Far From Heaven: the stiffly fancy clothing, the colorful bric-a-brac strewn about homes and offices as needy displays of upper class modernism, and the bursts of fall foliage that represent hopefulness and doom, the leaves’ very prettiness an announcement that they will soon plummet and die. It’s his mastery of something far more elusive that most distinctly sets the film apart. That thing is tone. The movie doesn’t mock or heap disdain upon its inspirations, nor does it indulge in the sort of plain duplication that would make it nothing more than a curiosity. It is knowing and sweetly oblivious at the same time, enamored with its own superficiality and yet infused with richer meaning. These juxtapositions lead to one more perfect paradox. In making a film that is intentionally derivative, Todd Haynes crafted a piece of art that is wholly original.

(Posted simultaneously to “Jelly-Town!”)