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"FAR FROM HEAVEN"
107 minutes | Rated: PG-13
NY/LA: Friday, November 8, 2002
LIMITED: Friday, November 15, 2002
Written & directed by Todd Haynes
Starring Julianne Moore, Dennis Quaid, Dennis Haysbert, Patricia Clarkson, Viola Davis, James Rebhorn, Celia Weston, Johnathan McClain
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This film is on the Best of 2002 list.
COUCH CRITIQUE
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SMALL SCREEN SHRINKAGE: 25%
WIDESCREEN: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
The sumptuous, gorgeous photography is quite important to the impact of this film's idealistic-facade setting. It will probably still blow you away on VHS pan-and-scan, but watching it in widescreen will submerge you in its world.
VIDEO RELEASE: 04.01.2003
DVD SPOTLIGHT
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Haynes' commentary track is unfortunately over-prepared and lacking joy. He quotes Fassbinder on Sirk. He talks about the precision of "building on delicate cliches." He reads from his director's statement, from his notes, from film theorists' essays on Sirk. It's very dry.
Skip the commentary and the watch two making-of featurettes. One is a terrific "Anatomy of a Scene" episode from Sundance Channel that explores every element (lighting, editing, score, acting, costumes, etc.) from one scene -- in this case the party scene. The other is a pretty good cable-TV-style making-of featurette, in which Haynes describes trying to recreate a cinematic style that hasn't been seen in years and talks in succinct depth about each specific performances as he should have done in the commentary.
OTHER NOTABLE BONUS MATERIAL
Haynes & Moore in a post-screening Q&A (there's no info about where or when), that is short on info and long on distractingly intercut scenes from the movie.
SPECS
RATIO: 1.85:1 (16x9 enhanced)
SOUND: Dolby 5.1
DUBS: French
SUBS: English, Spanish, French
DIGITAL TRANSFER
Excellent
DVD RATING: ***
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Writer-director Haynes sees through the idyllic facade of post-War Americana in potent, poignant Sirk-styled melodrama
An extraordinary homage to, and deconstruction of, Douglas Sirk's melodramas of the 1950s, "Far from Heaven" is a layer cake of potent emotion, puritanical taboo, composed anguish, and forbidden affections festering below the idealistic facade of an Eisenhower-era New England family.
Operating on three levels at once while giving each a rich, resonant texture, writer-director Todd Haynes ("Safe," "Velvet Goldmine") ensnares the audience in the idyllic Technicolor fiction of the period in which it takes place -- right down to the sweeping, cursive title credits so corny they get a laugh. He plumbs the highly sensitive, highly secretive true hearts of his characters, who desperately try to plaster over cracks in the perfect-family facade as their lives unravel. But at the same time he discredits the halcyon image of a time that demanded such concealment by exposing its rampant, acute discrimination and its all-consuming importance of keeping up appearances.
Julianne Moore gives an intense, captivating, flawless performance as Cathy Whitaker, a consummate '50s housewife with a seemingly perfect husband named Frank (Dennis Quaid) who is a sales executive for a line of televisions, and two obedient children who never need scolding for infractions any worse than saying "Aw, jeez!" when told it's time for bed.
She's been profiled in the newspaper society pages. She is always perfectly coifed and immaculately dressed in pretty, petticoated Dior knock-offs with small waists and capped sleeves. And from time to time she and her housewife neighbors secretly nurse daiquiris in her kitchen while gossiping ("She's been liberal ever since she played summer stock with all those seamy Jewish boys," one sniffs disapprovingly about an acquaintance) and tittering in whispers about sex ("Once a week? You get off easy!").
But Cathy's superlatively ordered world comes crashing down around her when she's inspired to take her late-working husband his dinner at the office one night, only to walk in on him kissing another man. With Frank's tortured feelings about his homosexuality driving him to drink, and with no one safe to confide in (her girlfriends would shun her if they knew), Cathy becomes drawn to the tender understanding of her gardner (Dennis Haysbert), with whom she dare not be seen in public, not only because he's not her husband and he's not of her social class, but especially because he's black.
"Far from Heaven" is ingrained with the spirit and the trappings of its inspirations (films like Sirk's "All the Heaven Allows" and "Imitation of Life"). Its homes and costumes (by the brilliant Sandy Powell) are immaculate, and it's always a perfect autumn day full of vivid colors and chirping birds on its often unmistakably soundstage sets. But more importantly "Heaven" taps the very souls of every overly succulent character so effectively you can feel the melodramatic weight of these events as if you were trapped in their artificially genteel lives right alongside them.
Looking every inch the clip-art image of a '50s businessman, Quaid gives a powerful, compelling performance of Frank's anguish over the desires he's tried desperately to deny for years. "I know it's a sickness," he cries to Cathy in a gut-wrenching confession, "because it makes me feel despicable." But even as he seeks psychological and medical "treatment," and reconciliation with his wife, Frank is torn apart, finally reaching a breaking point that turns the tide of the movie.
Sonorous, soft-spoken Haysbert (President Palmer on Fox's serial thriller "24") is perfectly cast as Raymond the gardner, a single father with a love of modern art and a business degree he has been unable to put to use because of his position in society. As his relationship with Cathy evolves into an unspoken romance that can never be consummated, they risk brief and seemingly innocuous public rendezvous that bring the thinly veiled wrath of both their communities.
And through it all Moore portrays poignantly, and without a touch of the irony that lurks in the dark corners of the film, Cathy's desperate, needful clinging to her illusions of a Ladies' Home Journal life.
"Far from Heaven" is a masterful marriage of the immaculate, if precarious, image of blissful post-War Americana with the authentic, imperfect humanity and the malignant subterfuge that always lay beneath it. That Haynes can both maintain and dismantle the facades that his genre and his characters construct is a wonderous accomplishment of veracity and narrative grace, so effectively and emotionally enveloping that this picture will almost certainly be one of the two or three best movies of 2002.
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