A glimpse of heaven

10 April 2012

Watching Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven — and for the second time, too — I felt I was back in movie-goers’ heaven. This is how it used to be in the Fifties. Every week brought a film as good as this, or seemed to.

They took trouble, then, over their stories, their craftsmanship, every element in their movies. And many said something. Far From Heaven deliberately looks like a Fifties film.

Specifically, it looks like Douglas Sirk’s 1955 movie, All That Heaven Allows, starring Jane Wyman as the small-town widow who has an affair with her hunky, younger gardener, Rock Hudson, affronts the community’s snobs, but puts her children before her own love.

Sounds like a “woman’s weepie”? That’s what we called ’em back then. But Haynes has taken the shell of Sirk’s film and reinterpreted its core values. The result is dazzling, unique and, yes, moving. In the 1950s, the Hollywood morality code still ruled the actions of screen characters.

Whole aspects of American daily life were formally forbidden to be presented in films: candid and overt sex, naturally, but also interracial relations and homosexuality, two of the issues that the anti-segregation movement and the Kinsey Report were bringing home to the American doorstep, simply didn’t figure in the lush Hollywood entertainment of the day.

What Haynes has done is insert them into his movie, thus reinterpreting how the story might have played had it been made without inhibitions or taboos 50 years ago.

It reveals the darkness in the American dream — but in a way that makes the dream now look irresistibly, evocatively seductive to the world we live in. Innocence is thus dispelled and conscience cleansed; but nostalgia is served, too.

Julianne Moore plays Cathy — not a widow this time, but a married woman. She is the very model of unflappable motherhood and a poised pillar of the community in her colourmatched flared skirt, chiffon scarf, handbag and ladylike high-heels; a role model to her friends, living amid a blaze of autumn in a spotless home with an executive husband, Frank (Dennis Quaid), who is top man at Magnatex TV, and two kids who do what mother says and call Dad “Sir”.

From the first announcement of the film’s title, in flamboyantly confident pastel blue against a premonitory flutter of golden leaves, and as Edward Lachman’s camera drifts dreamily down from the skies to catch Cathy’s station wagon while Elmer Bernstein’s score soars in the opposite direction, you know that all this perfection is under threat.

But while it lasts, it’s totally tantalising. Every element of a Douglas Sirk domestic melodrama is present and enhanced — digitally, I suspect, where the tones of autumn are concerned — with the sense of a society in which everything works, where the folk are outwardly-polite and the maids (black, of course) are loyal and loving.

It is like a pick-me-up for our own jaded times, shabby looks and bruising entertainment. I’ve not seen a film in ages that looks so good, feels so good: this is true “golden oldie” stuff.

Cathy’s world begins to shake, however. First, Frank is booked for drinkdriving just as she has got her fur wrap on to go out for dinner. But then that’s what men do, isn’t it — drink?

A few weeks later, though, when taking him the dinner (in a Tupperware box, naturally) he is too busy at the office to come home for, Cathy finds her husband doing something men don’t do — in another guy’s arms. Haynes plants the stigma of homosexuality in this perfect household-with finesse: just enough angst to upset the balance of domestic bliss, but also enough fidelity from Cathy to bear up.

The analyst whom Frank consults, with Cathy understandably left in the anteroom, is a voice from the past when gay rights hadn’t even a name, never mind a movement, and shock therapy was supposed to restore “hormonal balance”. But the damage has been done.

Cathy turns for platonic consolation to Raymond, her husky gardener (Dennis Haysbert) — and he’s black. All right to patronise “the Negroes”, few on the ground anyhow in Connecticut, as a cocktail party guest observes while taking a canapé from a black waiter, but not done to confide in “them”.

When Cathy’s friends at the Bridge club hear, see, and even spy on a white matron accepting a lift in a black handyman’s pick-up truck, eating at an all-black diner, and — rumour hath it — dancing with him, a spiteful, frightened world closes ranks.

Haysbert is a splendid addition to the gallery of black Hollywood stars. He gives a strong, tender, intelligent, perfectly calculated performance; not too good to be true — for, after all, a black guy could, just could, know how to pronounce “Miró” at the local art show and would certainly have been aware (and wary) of the perils of admitting a white woman to his own racially touchy world.

As the tortured hubby, Quaid seems to transcend the Fifties period and take the first step into a new era where sexuality is honestly defended, if not yet exactly advertised. But it is Julianne Moore who puts the heart in the picture.

She balances Cathy’s “Miss Manners” personality with an unpriggish self-assuredness and traverses the short but painful journey from idolising wife to eye-opened womanhood with graceful and revealing understatement.

Jane Wyman had a happy ending awaiting her in All That Heaven Allows. True to its post-modern perspective, Far From Heaven arranges the choices to show that easy answers are no longer an option, that sacrifice is a feminine fate, that a husband can move on to a new life, and that a wife is left with the kids and a waxpolished home.

Without rubbing our noses in it, Far From Heaven makes a feminist statement out of a woman’s weepie. Viola Davis (as her devoted maid) and Patricia Clarkson (as her notsosturdy best friend) repay the attention given to the flawless production design (Mark Friedberg) and exemplary wardrobe (Sandy Powell).