Questions kept running through my mind while watching “Far From Heaven.” Is the entire meaning of this film on its surface? That is, are we simply supposed to empathize with these characters, wonder what’s going to happen to them next, and worry that things will not go well? (If so, then the use of the Bernstein score kept me from empathizing with them nearly as much as I could have.) Or is the film’s use of the Sirk style intended to change its meaning? Should we be actively comparing “now” America with “then” America, and current filmmaking with past filmmaking? If this is the case, then I don’t think I “got it,” at least not after one viewing. But that’s my problem, not necessarily the movie’s. In the DVD extras, Todd Haynes suggests that “Far From Heaven” can be seen either way.
But onto the film itself. Julianne Moore plays the perfect suburban housewife in Hartford, Connecticut, with a beautiful home, regular cocktail parties with the Girls, and two adorable children. Her husband (Dennis Quaid) is the quintessential good-looking guy with a good haircut. He is a successful executive at a television company and a World War II vet with no emotional issues. But something is lurking beneath the surface—there always is—and when Moore walks in on Quaid, late one night at the office, we find out what it is. Quaid’s secret begins to drive a wedge not just between man and wife, but through the entire family. The parents increasingly ignore their children and Moore doesn’t even feel comfortable talking to her best friend (Patricia Clarkson of “The Pledge”) about what’s happening. Instead, she turns to her new gardener, played as a gentle giant by Dennis Haysbert of “Heat” and TV’s “24.” They form a sweet friendship that might turn into something more and, while she doesn’t directly talk about her husband’s problems, she feels that she’s opening up for the first time in her life. “Sometimes it takes someone from a different world to teach us things about ourselves,” Haysbert says (is he talking about the entire movie?). Trouble is, she’s white and he’s black, and when they’re spotted going to a restaurant together, there isn’t just talk, there’s Talk.
“Far From Heaven” is extremely observant with the social and interpersonal details of its time (or at least convinces me it is; I wasn’t alive then). The movie handles race well, and not in a heavy-handed, holier-than-thou manner. Moore is described in glowing terms by the local paper as a “friend to the Negro,” but she treats them often with a head-patting maternity, and hardly knows a thing about her black housemaid, played by Viola Davis of “Solaris.” (For truly brilliant, invisible servant-and-master choreography, check out Mike Leigh’s “Topsy-Turvy”). Many of her friends think integration is just fine, but we sense they want it to start somewhere else and only get here after they’re in the ground (this seems to be the way of social morality; most Americans today agree that the world’s air would be better if everyone drove an electric car that could only go 55 mph, but nobody wants to be the first in the pool). Haysbert is a good man, but not any more at home in the African-American community than with Moore’s friends, and his own neighbors ostracize him when she is seen with him.
As for Quaid’s dirty little secret, well, let’s keep that a secret, but I will say that this is probably the finest performance of his career, as a man who wants to do right by his wife, family, and culture, but also wants to be happy. He comes home night after night, late and depressed and moody, choking down cigarettes and his wife’s banal pleasantries. Regardless of what his problem is, he is trapped in that age-old quandary of feeling that his wife is too concerned with the appearance of contentment to be of any real consolation. As for Moore, her performance is all the more daring because she begins the movie as being genuinely happy with society’s role for her as wife and mother. It’s only when things begin to go wrong that her social construction of herself is unmerciful. Like many of us, she believes that if the lie of happiness is strong enough, it will become the truth. When she cries for the first time, she has to run outside and hide in the bushes to do it, lest her true feelings of turmoil infect her perfect house.
“Far From Heaven” would make an interesting companion to Curtis Hanson’s great “L.A. Confidential,” which is set at the same time, but told with a modern style through a modern lens. It might make an even more interesting double feature with “The Hours,” a third of which is devoted to Julianne Moore playing—you guessed it—a troubled housewife in the 1950s. “The Hours” is told in a modern style and, like a modern movie, cannot conceive of housefraus leading fulfilling lives.
With films like “Pulp Fiction,” “Goodfellas,” and “Fargo,” the male-oriented Method acting of the 1970s got something of a renaissance in the 1990s; my sentiments upon analyzing “Far From Heaven” are that now might be as good a time as any to revive the 1950s melodrama. These films from the 50s may have little bearing on the reality of that time, and they certainly don’t cut as deep into our universal fears of authority, guilt, and mothers the way Hitchcock’s films of the same time do. But they do exist as social documents of a culture’s aspirations and views of itself, and that counts for something.
Finished April 12th, 2003
Copyright © 2003 Friday & Saturday Night
Page one of "Far From Heaven." Back to archive