Far From Heaven arrives in Baltimore today on cascades of critical praise. It's the oddest case yet of the Emperor's New Clothes. After all, the Emperor in the fairy tale was naked. This movie has tons of fabulous clothing. The people disappear within their wardrobes.
The story, set in suburban Connecticut in 1957-58, couldn't be simpler. Julianne Moore plays Cathy Whitaker, a housewife whose "ideal marriage" to a corporate hot shot (Dennis Quaid) falls apart because he is gay. She turns for understanding to her noble, sympathetic black gardener (Dennis Haysbert), with dire consequences.
Non-initiates who wander into this movie will wonder whether they're meant to laugh at the actors' stiff poses and their attempts to speak women's-magazine dialogue from a half-century ago: An altercation with police is "a silly, wretched mistake," and a wife trying to reassure her spouse proclaims, "You're the only man I ever wanted. You're all men to me. You're all man."
I think we are supposed to snicker at Moore's caricatured society friends and a portly gay art expert from New York when they cast pop-eyed looks at Moore and Haysbert acting friendly at a ladies' auxiliary art show. In a rare stylistic glitch that betrays the filmmakers' reductionist attitudes, they photograph the white folk at the art show like pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Initiates will note that writer-director Todd Haynes stuffs his aesthetic Cuisinart with Douglas Sirk's celebrated '50s soap operas, including Imitation of Life, Written on the Wind and All That Heaven Allows. He spices up the social criticisms in these crowd-pleasers and turns their campier elements into out-and-out gay melodrama.
Pauline Kael pinpointed Sirk's limits when she described his "talent for whipping up sour, stylized soap operas in posh settings." Haynes, though, is a Sirk idolator. The discreet fascism of the bourgeoisie - that's what Haynes sees in Sirk's four-hanky classics about mixed-racial friendship, competitive buddyhood and a widow in love with a tree surgeon. Fifties ticket-buyers who enjoyed Sirk's movies weren't sucked into an orgy of self-hate; they loved these films as high-toned tearjerkers. But Haynes' revamp of Sirk's genre is a vehicle for condemning a racist, homophobic and anti-feminist America. By implication, he's saying that a renewed reverence for '50s values is bringing that America back today.
If you watch Haynes and his collaborators explain themselves on Sundance Channel's Anatomy of a Scene Tuesday at 10 p.m., you can get pulled into their mistaking of technique for metaphor and meaning. Character and incident are fascinating to them only when it is refracted through their version of Sirk's moviemaking methods.
Intricate staging and camera movements, and modulated contrasts in color, lighting and decor are supposed to convey emotions the characters are too repressed to express. If you really believe that a woman photographed from a low angle is heroic because she seems pitted against "the full weight of bourgeois space," then this is the movie for you.
Judging from their work here, you'd never guess what game, genuine performers all three stars can be. You'd have to see Moore in, say, Vanya on 42nd Street or The End of the Affair, Quaid in The Right Stuff or Frequency or The Rookie, or Haysbert on TV's 24 or Love Field with Michelle Pfeiffer. (Indeed, Love Field was an unpretentious, penetrating update of a traditional "woman's film.") Then again, if they acted with instincts intact in Far From Heaven, they'd stick out from the parade of snide or weak conformists and clueless authority figures in the rest of the movie.
Haynes started his career directing Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, a brilliant biopic done with Barbie dolls. Far From Heaven makes it look as if he's been working toward staging A Doll's House with real dolls.
Far From Heaven
Starring Julianne Moore, Dennis Quaid, Dennis Haysbert
Directed by Todd Haynes
Rated PG-13
Released by Focus
Time 107 minutes
Score score *1/2