Far From Heaven
What a neat idea, to make a movie
about the 1950s that looks exactly like it was made in the 1950s (well, except
for a much greater quality of film stock, but I won’t get too picky).
Writer/director Todd Haynes has done just this with Far From Heaven,
modeled primarily after the works of director Douglas Sirk (Written on the
Wind, All That Heaven Allows, etc.), a filmmaker who
specialized in romantic tales of forbidden love and/or love against the odds. Haynes uses this model to tell a tale about the “typical”
American family of the day, except for a few blemishes that we in this more
enlightened age know all families have. Or,
most families, maybe, since mine sure never had blemishes like these.
Kathleen Whittaker (Julianne
Moore, in an Oscar-nominated performance) is the perfect example of the June
Cleaver-type wife and mother we all wish our Mom was. She keeps a perfect home, raises two perfect children and has
dinner ready when her hard-working husband comes home in the evening.
Kathy throws perfect dinner parties and involves herself in social causes
(a newspaper article states that she is “kind to Negroes”).
Her husband, Frank (Dennis Quaid, in what should’ve been an
Oscar-nominated performance), is a wildly successful salesman for an electronics
company, and is held up by their community of Hartford, Connecticut as an
example for others to emulate. You
know, pure fantasy life, and like all “perfect” lives, it has nothing to do
with reality.
It seems that Frank is having
homosexual urges, and even manages to find a gay bar in Hartford, Connecticut in
1957 to indulge those urges. Who
would’ve guessed there were such things back then…? Kathy discovers the “problem,” and she supports him
wholeheartedly when he says he’ll seek help, as he doesn’t want this
“problem” to wreck his life. Meanwhile,
she finds herself growing friendlier with Raymond Deagen (Dennis Haysbert), a
local business owner and their landscaper.
Raymond being black, her treating him as an equal causes a great ruckus
in her social circles.
It must be known up front that
Haynes is homosexual, and thus one could presume the moral stance of this film
before seeing the first frame. One
would not be entirely correct, however, as in large part Haynes depicts America
in the late ‘50s as they were, and not as he might have wished it to be.
Frank’s homosexuality is looked upon as a sickness, not a “lifestyle
choice,” and he is disgusted by his own tendencies.
His anger at himself causes him to lash out at Kathy, and when he screams
the only four-letter word of the entire film at her, they both instantly realize
how out-of-place such language is in their little universe.
Haynes also shows us a faithful
depiction of the liberal hypocrisy of the day, correctly showing white liberals
proclaiming their open-mindedness but resorted to good old-fashioned hostility
and slander when imagining a Negro not to be in his proper place.
In one scene, we see a white character at Kathy’s dinner party telling
another how integration would not be a problem for Hartford since there are no
blacks there to integrate, as colored servants mill all about them, yet in
another, we learn three white boys are expelled from school after they mistreat
a little black girl.
The movie is absorbing and
involving, and Moore and Quaid deserve all the accolades they’ve received for
their performances, but it’s also worth watching for its style.
The transitions from scene to scene, the musical punctuations of dramatic
moments, and even some of the sweeping overhead shots from crane-mounted
cameras, all are used exactly as filmmakers of the 1950s used them.
Such techniques add a feel to the film, a feeling of other-worldliness,
even though it’s a world we all imagine we know, having seen all those movies
and TV shows from the 50s, and heard about it from our parents.
Sirk, whom some cinema students
suspect was also homosexual, often veiled deeper social messages in his films,
ones that would not have been too appealing to audiences of the day.
He, too, dealt with social inequality and prejudice, and he even had Rock
Hudson in a couple of movies (that says a lot about the “gay thing,”
doesn’t it?). Haynes has no such
hang-ups or hindrances, and lays his message out pretty plainly.
He doesn’t give us a clichéd happy ending, nor does he heap great
tragedy upon his characters. Their
lives simply continue, after we’ve seen small slices of them.
Larry Smoak
April 20, 2003
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