Not Far Enough
by Kevin Lee

Far From Heaven, the highly anticipated new film by Todd Haynes, is a postmodern reworking of the melodramatic genre that was prominent in the 1950s, especially the films of Douglas Sirk. To me, the key question in evaluating this film is not its technical accomplishment and visual beauty - the virtues of both go without saying. Those looking for a pleasurable movie experience will not be disappointed. My dilemma concerns the nature of the content. The question that has bothered me since seeing the film is: to what extent is this a beautifully assembled exercise in revisionist nostalgia, and to what extent is this a truly probing look at 1950s values and attitudes towards sex and race, and what bearing it has on our world today?

The story centers on the life of comfortable Hartford housewife Cathy, whose perfect household with husband (Dennis Quaid) and two adorable children makes her the toast of the neighborhood. The obsessive pursuit of perfection and its gradual undoing is a theme that runs through much of Haynes' oeuvre, most notably in his Superstar: the Karen Carpenter Story and Safe, which like Far From Heaven feature a female protagonist. The perfect veneer of Cathy's existence starts to show cracks when she catches her husband in the midst of a fling with another man. As her husband undergoes therapy to "cure" his condition, Cathy finds herself strangely attracted to her kind, mysteriously thoughtful black gardener Raymond Deagan (sensitively played by Dennis Haysbert). Unfortunately, however fulfilling she finds her conversations with Raymond, the very sight of them together launches an avalanche of gossip and scornful suspicion from her friends and neighbors.

Among the many praiseworthy elements of the film, Julianne Moore stands out. The world of this film is seen largely through the eyes of her character, and it is through her heartfelt but remarkably subtle performance that we perceive the shades of this worldview gradually evolving. Quaid may be subject to skepticism in his role as a closeted gay man; one can discern discomfort on his part in a scene where he kisses another man. But I find this unease true to his character and reflective of the deep self-hatred experienced by many homosexuals in a society that deemed them to be miscreants.

Equally if not more praiseworthy is the lavish production design, creating an atmosphere so rich in its affluence that it's suffocating. Together with the gloriously arranged lighting and rigidly colorful costumes, this film offers an intoxicating surface beauty; like Haynes' earlier masterpiece Safe, it breeds a feeling of imperceptible ambient terror. The muted, plaintive melodies in the classic '50s score by Elmer Bernstein is a perfect mirror to Cathy's emotional states.

It is to Haynes' credit that he resists overplaying the melodramatic nature of the story, which contributes to the plausibility of these characters and their respective experiences in their historical setting. There are a number of scenes whose ambiguous subtexts invite careful inquiry. One of my favorites is when Cathy and her friends are discussing their sex lives. It seems that each of them make pains to show how much they dislike having sex with their husbands, as if that was the proper Victorian attitude expected of a lady. And yet the fact of the conversation taking place attests to their repressed desires seeking some kind of release.

On the other hand, I can't help but perceive a soporific quality to the handsomeness of this production, and a relative lack of risk in the way Haynes' script assigns everyone to their insular worlds of repressed desires. In the end, everyone is more or less relegated to their own places, resulting in a world whose fragmentation connects to the way things are today, but is hardly illuminating in its tone of resignation. It seems in the end that Haynes is either incapable or unwilling to really mix things up to see what happens.

To clarify this point further, it may be worthwhile to compare Haynes' film with those of Douglas Sirk, whose classic tearjerkers, especially All That Heaven Allows, and to a lesser extent Imitation of Life, inspired this film. It is commendable that Far From Heaven takes a more realistic approach to depicting a '50s milieu of sexual repression; indeed, Sirk's outrageously expressive tearjerkers have been criticized for having no bearing on real life. But Sirk, a formalist, was devoted to artifice, because he was convinced that life was nothing but images and ideas that people project to create their own lifestyles and values. While this seems similar to what Haynes does in his films, Sirk's films took it one step further, relentlessly scrutinizing and overturning any and all assumptions on race, class and sexuality. His films, especially his masterpiece, Imitation of Life, are a testament to his assiduous effort.

If we compare Dennis Haysbert's gardener character with his obvious counterpart, Rock Hudson's gardener character in All That Heaven Allows. Hudson's manly outdoorsman is presented as a perfect ideal that lures Jane Wyman's housewife away from her stifling middle class surroundings, but by the end it becomes evident that this ideal image was little more than a misleading projection of Wyman's desire. A similar effect is in operation with the way that Moore's Cathy desires and idealizes Haysbert's Raymond, whose intelligence and unwavering goodness seems too good to be true (if not a bit patronizing to African Americans). Unfortunately, Haynes never really digs into Raymond's character, settling instead for the rather conservative conclusion that a middle-class white woman can't get away with running off with her black gardener, leaving the projection of a perfect black ideal intact. Douglas Sirk would have never been so sparing in his scrutiny. Even Haynes' Safe was more diligent at stripping away all the illusions of institutionalized comfort, leaving the heroine with nothing but the reflection of her own desire to contend with.

In the end, Todd Haynes must answer to his own vision; his vision in Far From Heaven is certainly marvelous on a technical and visual level, and on a thematic level it makes a number of observations on how sex and race were treated in society, reflecting on the situation today, and on these grounds it is a film to take seriously. The lingering problem I have is that Haynes went only so far in exploring these themes as your standard Oscar contender, and there's no doubt in my mind that this film will be in the running come awards time. At worst, this new film says to me that Haynes is trading in the unyielding thematic force of his previous films for the sake of aesthetic beauty and mainstream crossover appeal. I hope that this is far from the case.

©2002 Kevin Lee
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