*** (out of ****)
Starring Julianne Moore, Dennis Quaid, Dennis Haysbert, Patricia Clarkson, Viola Davis, and James Rebhorn
Directed & written by Todd Haynes
2002 PG13
When Sergei Profokiev wrote his “Classical Symphony,” the classical style had been dead for about a century. In order to write his “Ancient Ayres and Dances,” 20th-century composer Ottorino Respighi went back even further to find his melodies, all the way to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries. The painting and literary movement of the 1800s known as the Pre-Raphaelites is perhaps the most overt example of artists in one era using the language of another. The history of the arts is filled with forward-thinkers, but also with men and women willing to mine the past in order to express what they feel today.
I prefer to see the arts—painting, sculpture, acting, filmmaking, writing—not as a steady progression from artifice to an exact imitation of reality, but as a cycle in which different interpretations of reality come in-and-out of vogue. Some people will tell you that today’s films, through their acting, writing, and direction, capture reality better than any other era. But this is not the case; modern audiences have simply been conditioned to see an arbitrary style as “realistic.” Every filmmaking era and style can claim reality in one area while being accused of blatant falsehood in a different. What seems real now may seem artificial in a decade. To wit: the average modern movie is comprised largely of shots that last for three to fifteen seconds before being spliced into the next image. This is not at all like reality. If it were everyone would be jumping around madly, even out windows, to see things from a different angle. So, in that respect, the most “realistic” movie I have ever seen, because it does not contain a single edit, is “Russian Ark.”
I mention all this not because you’re a pretty girl in a bar and I’m trying to pick you up by sounding smart, but because writer-director Todd Haynes has done just what Respighi and the Pre-Raphaelites did. His film “Far From Heaven” is an experiment in which he recreates the filmmaking style of the 1950s, and I want to stress that films from the 50s are no less real than modern movies. Haynes is, specifically, trying to recreate the melodramas and “women’s pictures” by directors such as Douglas Sirk, whose repertoire includes “Written on the Wind” and “All That Heaven Allows.” These films mix noir shadows with brazen Technicolor, are usually filmed on obvious soundstages, and feature beautifully coifed actors and actresses at the height of Hollywood studio system, usually standing in front of furniture instead of interacting with their surroundings. Sirk’s subject matter usually involves a married, domestic woman confronting social issues, such as race, infidelity, and, very codedly, homosexuality. A lot of them star Rock Hudson. Dialogue is stilted and stylized, framing favors stiff long shots, there is a string orchestra to punch up every line of dialogue, and when the actors need to let go and scream, boy how, do they let go.
This is not my favorite era. In fact, 1950s melodrama is probably the style of filmmaking with which I feel the least rapport. This distance has nothing to do with the movies being “old.” “Bridge on the River Kwai,” “Vertigo,” “Ikiru,” and “Touch of Evil” are among my favorite movies, all from the 1950s. What separates me from the soap operas of the 1950s—and they are soap operas—is that I’ve never been able to penetrate their coded language and images, and their mixture of detachment and overwrought sentimentality leaves me clammy.
“Far From Heaven” is an almost total homage to Sirk, with all of Sirk’s flaws and strengths. The movie is straight, and not a half-parody, like the Coen Brothers’ pseudo-noir “The Man Who Wasn’t There.” Cinematographer Edward Lachman has created a jaw-droppingly gorgeous, autumnal world; composer Elmer Bernstein crushes the emotional impact out of every dramatic scene with overtly manipulative music; Haynes’ heroine tries her best to tackle issues of race, infidelity, and homosexuality, succeeding and failing just like the rest of us, all while trying to maintain the too-perfect home of the 1950s; and the framing all feels odd and distanced, but not in the coldly clinical Kubrick way. Subjecting modern audiences to a style that is so alien to them, so oddly-paced, is nothing short of daring, and Haynes should be congratulated. He sincerely believes that Sirk’s presentation of a story is still a valid one, even if I have my doubts.
Page two of "Far From Heaven." Back to archive.