Far from Heaven

Take yourself back fifty years, but do it with todays cinematic technology and todays acting and you have this film, a parody of the old silver screen star cast melodrama. I found myself fascinated by the perfect streets, perfect cars, and perfect people all untouched by dirty humanity. Even a panhandler and the furtive scenes in a gay bar had an unreal cleanliness about them.

I watched 50s films as a rapt 20-year-old believer. Seeing this film with my 21st century eyes, its hard for me to accept my previous enthusiasm for this kind of melodrama 50 years ago, but it was a different time. What is even more disturbing is the fact that this is a better film than those were.

The particular kind of suppressed communication and forced superficiality that existed in the 1950s is embedded as a significant problem element in this plot. It pervades and exacerbates the more dramatic plot issues of the husbands homosexuality and the wifes attraction to another man. Even setting this film as a period piece in the 50s with the artificial restraints that were active during those times, the two plot issues, a gay husband and an African American other man are treated in the screenplay with sensitivity and tenderness.

In many ways, a period piece set longer ago, for example, in the nineteenth century, is easier to portray and easier to act. Its further away from us and less familiar, so that there is more flexibility in its acceptance by the audience. That kind of film, a Jane Austen story for example, attempts to recreate the reality of the time without imposing artificial restraints. The challenge for the writer-director and the cast of this film was to set a period piece, not that far from us in time and recreate the artificial portrayal of that reality used by moviemakers of the 50s.

It is all those aspects of the film that make it interesting. It is certainly not the storyline, which is straightforward and predictable. Although, in my view, it is a tribute to the screenwriter that the story resolution has todays recognition of the way things really happen.

Todd Haynes wrote and directed this film. His early work was outside the box and rebellious Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987) was suppressed by a lawsuit, Poison (1991) was denounced by the Right as pornographic and Safe (1995) has been considered a metaphor about AIDS.

In this film, Julianne Moore plays Cathy Whitaker and Dennis Quaid plays Frank Whitaker and it is their acting that carries the story. Their characters are unreal people going through real situations with all the constraints I have mentioned. Moore was born Julie Anne Smith, her father a military judge and her mother a Scottish social worker. Her career began on the stage in New York, circa 1980s. She has been in numerous excellent films, and she was nominated this year for Oscars both for her lead in this film and for her supporting role in The Hours (2002).

Quaids film career began in 1975, but he wasnt recognized as lead material until his role as an astronaut in The Right Stuff (1983). I saw him last in Traffic (2000) and Frequency (2000).

Reviewed June 9, 2003.