Ten bucks says that Ricky battered Lucy and Ward Cleaver had a crush on Rock Hudson. It is almost a game now among pop culture nuts to decode the subtexts of those unbelievably pure television shows of the 1950s. A war had just ended and audiences wanted something that reflected their desires for an existence that was simple, happy and clean. But the title of Todd Haynes’s new film, Far From Heaven, tells it like it really was. Real life is distant from TV nirvana, and people want things they can’t have and get things they don’t want. Cathy (Julianne Moore) and Frank Whitaker (Dennis Quaid) are a two-child couple living in 1957 Hartford, Conn. who seem to represent all that is right about small town America. Two wee problems, though. Frank is a closeted homosexual and Cathy falls for her black gardener (Dennis Haysbert). Yes, emotions run high in this beautiful and sincere film that tries to bring earnest sentiment back to the cinema.
Back around the middle of the last century, a German expatriate named Douglas Sirk made a few movies that are generally regarded to be exemplars of the genre known as the melodrama. These “women’s pictures” had one goal?to move the audience and elicit tears. Usually featuring female protagonists in impossible romances or domestic situations, the Sirkian melodrama was lush in every sense of the word?soaring orchestrals, vibrant colors and grand illusions. It is this type of film that Haynes is fashioning.
A slight remake of Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, Heaven is a ‘50s flick made half a century too late. The language is affected and spotless as children say “golly” and fathers cry “heck.” Cathy’s costumes are perfect?chiffon scarves over dresses that improbably match the fall leaves. The lighting is appropriately soft-focus, angles go dutch at the first sign of trouble, and music soars at the slightest invocation. Haynes succeeds at this game of homage, for Heaven abounds with emotion at every turn and the possibility of tragedy hangs over every exchange. This alone, though, is nothing special.
What distinguishes the film is Haynes’s mastery of making the subtext explicit. His past three movies have worked to reveal that which is barely acknowledged?the splinters just below the skin of society. Here, he places prominent the racism and repressed homosexuality that could never have been displayed in films of the era. While still dealing with issues of queerness and the harm people inflict upon each other, Haynes has given us a widely accessible film, bursting with sentiments both simple and honest.
One would think that such innocence would fall prey to our postmodern, ironic sensibilities, but Haynes wins the audience over in the end. Such a baring of the raw souls and ragged tragedies of inherently good people cannot but move the heart and yank our tears. Far From Heaven is far from manipulative; its intentions are blatant, genuine and wonderfully oblivious to the mean-spiritedness of our age.
