Frank Whitaker is an executive at advertising firm Magnatech. His wife Cathy features in the social pages of 'Weekly Gazette', posing in her model home. Indeed, in late 1950's Hartford Connecticut, Frank, Cathy and their two young children lead the kind of picture-perfect life to which the white middle classes all aspire - even Cathy's kindness to 'negroes' is tolerated as a badge of the newly fashionable liberalism.

Yet what starts with Frank returning home late from the office soon ends with the whole fabric of the Whitaker household coming apart at the seams, in a deconstruction of mainstream fifties values, as Frank and Cathy's most forbidden desires bubble up from the depths to disturb the surface calm.

In Todd Haynes' 'Far From Heaven', Dennis Quaid as Frank, and Dennis Haysbert as the black gardener Raymond Deagan, are both excellent, but Julianne Moore (who was offered her first ever leading role in Todd Haynes' 'Safe'), gives the real standout performance in this film as Cathy. Her demure exterior seems to conceal unfathomable depths, and her role here as a closeted, dissatisfied 50's housewife makes an interesting companion piece to her similar part in 'The Hours', not least because of the very different decisions that her character ends up making here.

Opening and closing with painted images of the autumn leaves and spring blossoms which frame the film's events, 'Far From Heaven' is very much concerned with colour, surface and changing times. Haynes' use of unnaturally bright colours and immaculate design is a recreation of the 1950's not so much as they really were, but rather as they were depicted in the technicolor melodramas of Douglas Sirk (especially 'All That Heaven Allows'). By adopting Sirk's stylised visual palette, but expanding Sirk's usual theme (class prejudice) with issues which would have been strictly taboo in a fifties film (homosexuality and race), Haynes suggests that prejudices, like the seasons, may change their form, but never completely disappear. As Raymond tells Cathy in a central scene where he extols the appeal of modern art: 'These colours show the same thing in different light'.

Although 'Far From Heaven' perhaps suffers from being slightly too long, it has, like a fine painting, a glossy surface that repays a lengthy and close viewing.

Anton Bitel, 3.3.3
To the Homepage