By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 15, 2002
The problem with "Far From Heaven" isn't that it's an imitation of life but that it's an imitation of "Imitation of Life." If you were really a fancy showoff, you'd call it a three-ring, hellzapoppin' Sirk-us, after "Imitation's" director, Douglas Sirk, who has clearly inspired "Far From Heaven's" director, Todd Haynes.
"Imitation of Life," itself a remake of a 1934 film, defines a '50s genre, which Haynes is trying to ape: lush, emotional, womanly, tragic, over-ripe, musically gushy, full of petticoats and tears and martinis. There's a discreet brush with a whispered-about social problem (like racism) to up the emotional voltage, but no true grappling with it as an issue. Three or four hankies will get its preferred viewers through the raptures of torment, unless you're a guy dragged by your better half down to the Bijou, where you'd probably fall asleep and have a nice dream about the neighbor gal in a French maid's outfit.
Haynes hits all these notes, but with a modern edge. Whereas Sirk, in "Imitation of Life" and "Written on the Wind" and others, pussyfooted around the social issue, the aim of "Far From Heaven" is to deliver it in your face, named, seen, dealt with in the open. But the trick is to do it without breaking the big-production, glossy Sirkian style. It's as if Haynes is trying to make exactly the movie he always wished Sirk had made.
It's set in 1957 in the tidy, prosperous city of Hartford, Conn., not yet fallen into urban decay, still clearly marked by racial boundaries as to neighborhood, an empire of conformism, unquestioning obedience and thwarted yearning. Under Hartford's dense elm canopy, amid its stately homes, the King and Queen of all they survey are Mr. and Mrs. Magnatech – that is, Frank and Cathy Whitaker. If they aren't the Fifties personified, nobody is, not even the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit who works in the Executive Suite with Cash McCall.
Mr. Magnatech – Frank is actually a television manufacturer's sales director – is on the go, peppy, making up for lost time and never without a fedora with a shrunken brim and a tightly noosed tie. As for Cathy, she's the sort who does the vacuuming in stockings, heels and pearls. And nothing else, you cynics are smirking. Not exactly, pervos. It's the '50s, remember? She's wearing everything else, such as one of her dozens of swirling Republican cloth coats in all the colors of the rainbow, a veritable museum of blouses and, always, about 70 petticoats that flounce like a stand of willows in the breeze and could probably stop a .357 Magnum.
Oh, the lucky Magnatechs, er, Whitakers. They have everything: the great job in cutting-edge tech, the big suburban house, the two-tone Buick Skylark station wagon with whitewalls and little tail finnettes, the two perfect children (shut up, kids, daddy wants to enjoy his Scotchy-wotchy in silence), enough stature in the community to attract the attention of the newspaper's fawning society section. Why, so perfect is the perfect Cathy that the changing leaves seem color-coded to her flaming red, perfectly sculpted hair, visually confirming her position at the center of the universe.
Except, hello, Frank (Dennis Quaid) is a closeted homosexual and Cathy (Julianne Moore) is falling in love with the Negro gardener.
Hmmm, that's something Sirk never thought of.
From those two realities unspool great awkwardnesses. Frank, discovered in a late-night office smoochfest with a pickup from a gay bar, attempts to "cure" himself under a psychiatrist's stern care. (Very funny, I must admit.) Cathy, distraught at Frank's secret desires, turns to the one person who will listen to her without judging her, the gardener Raymond Deagan (Dennis Haysbert). Meanwhile, rumors about Cathy begin to race around their tight little, oh-so-shockable social set, while Frank is coming progressively unglued and just can't concentrate on that fabulous '58 Magnatech line. Many tears are wept, many Scotches are belted down, and occasionally Cathy's mascara runs ever so slightly. Oh, the humanity, the humanity.
These dense emotional states, amplified by Elmer Bernstein's Ferrante & Teicher-like torrent of a score, dominate the movie but somehow never convince the viewer. Upheavals, discoveries, the piano going berserk, the leaves whirling madly off the trees, the whole grammar of '50s studio symbolism, it's all there, perfectly executed, based on hours of research – and it's dead as a doornail.
The movie has the sense of being embalmed, or pickled. With its stilted dialogue not quite kitschy enough to be funny and not quite authentic enough to be realistic, the whole movie feels as if it's taking place in formaldehyde. I'm certain that was Haynes's point, but somehow you're exiled by his ironic distance, his formalities, his sense of study.
And it's somehow more Fifties than the Fifties themselves were. That's because in the Fifties, of course, no one knew it was the Fifties. It wasn't anything. It just was. Moreover, it was never so pure as this; rather, the shabby, messy struggle that was reality then (as now) was clotted with memory and residue: old cars, old houses, old furniture, old clothes, old human beings. Reality was a reliquary of yesteryear, not a display of perfect research. So this movie has the ambiance of the museum to it, or a theme-park re-creation. It's achingly self-conscious and clumsy, something Sirk never was.