Haynes' Far from Heaven

A modern-day reworking of glossy 1950s melodramas, Todd Haynes' Far from Heaven is the kind of movie they don't make anymore; it's also the kind of movie "they" never would have made. That sounds like a contradiction, and perhaps it is. The ambitious writer-director Haynes specializes in contradiction; his motto might be, "Who says you can't eat your cake and have it, too?" As evidenced by Poison, Safe and Velvet Goldmine, he's obsessed with cherry-picking favorite pieces of film history. His movies aren't just movies; they're movies about movies, and the pleasures and perils of pop culture generally. In that sense, Haynes owes less to the current generation of movie brats, who come at each project with reckless energy, like starving young film students turned loose at an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord, and more to the 60s and 70s generation of postmodern novelists like John Fowles, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, who want you to be engrossed by their fiction even as they continually remind you that it is, after all, fiction.

All of which explains why Far from Heaven, a suburban melodrama set in 1958, manages to be at once esthetically fascinating and self-defeatingly academic. Road to Perdition risked the same fate, and detractors would say it succumbed; I thought its pulpy vitality and Hitchcock-style suspense setpieces gave it life beyond its references. The same can't be said for Heaven. Haynes is working in a particular cinematic vein; his movie pays tribute to the repressed theatrics of Douglas Sirk (Written on the Wind, All that Heaven Allows) while critiquing the conservative cultural values that stopped Sirk from probing his characters' repressions more deeply. But I fear the movie overthinks its own existence, to the point where every frame seems accompanied by implied footnotes with titles and release dates. For all its intelligence, ambition and passion, Far from Heaven often feels like a film-student twofer: a movie that comes with its own graduate thesis paper built right in.

(Warning: plot spoilers ahead.) Julianne Moore stars as heroine Cathy Whitaker, a white, blonde Connecticut housewife married to home electronics bigwig Frank Whitaker (Dennis Quaid). The couple are pillars of their community, and Cathy's life in suburban Stamford suggests ads from a 50s issue of Life or McCall's-a human-scale diorama of upper-middle-class aspiration, a collection of the latest furnishings and fashions. She has two cute kids and a polite, tactically aloof black housekeeper (Viola Davis). Her poofy skirts rustle like paper flowers; her car is so bright and shiny it almost seems computer-generated.

Her life looks so perfect and clean; of course she's sitting on a mother lode of dark secrets. Her much-admired husband is a repressed homosexual who takes any excuse to stay out late so he can hang out at secret gay bars and cruise the local movie house; just touching Cathy repulses him, so he drinks, ruining Cathy's social gatherings and jeopardizing his job. Stung by Frank's tormented resentment, Cathy strikes up a cordial friendship with her black groundskeeper, Raymond Deagan (Dennis Haysbert), a tall, polite, well-read single dad who, like Cathy, appreciates fine art and dreams of a life beyond the one he's living. Their friendship blossoms into something deeper, brushing against sexual fascination, but their fear of being ostracized and punished keeps them from letting their love turn physical. In its heart, Far from Heaven is about sensitive, yearning outsiders who desperately want to evolve but are thwarted by reactionary social forces beyond their control-a theme that links the picture to every other Haynes film, from Superstar through Velvet Goldmine.

On the basis of the taboo-busting gay-themed anthology Poison and the frequently raucous music melodrama Goldmine, you might expect Haynes to revise the source material that inspired him-to look at these period-piece stock characters from the perspective of a present-day, "sophisticated" moviegoer. But he doesn't; he treats each of the film's assorted Social Problems as they might be treated if Sirk (or Nicholas Ray) had been permitted to delve into them when Ike was president.

This is the most original aspect of Far from Heaven-the thing that prevents it from being just another repression-in-the-suburbs picture in period dress; it's also the movie's Achilles' heel. The dialogue dusts off political talk and psychological theories that have long since been discredited, and lets the characters grapple with them in a deadly earnest way. "I like all men I'm around to be all men," quips Cathy's smart, plucky but secretly reactionary best friend, brilliantly played by Patricia Clarkson. Frank seeks treatment for his "condition"-as Frank's shrink, ace character actor James Rebhorn does his customary dry-as-a-bone, know-it-all routine, promising "complete heterosexual conversion"-but his homosexuality and alcoholism are of a piece, and he keeps falling off the wagon. On a vacation with Cathy in Miami meant to repair their damaged marriage, Frank excuses himself from their poolside sojourn and ends up trysting in his hotel room with a sleek boy toy; in a moment of anguished humiliation, he lashes out at Cathy, blackening her eye and adding domestic violence to the list of things 1950s melodramas could not address frankly.

In sheer technique, it's stunning. Cinematographer Edward Lachman's clean, mostly static compositions and super-saturated hues effortlessly match up with Mark Friedberg's archeologically correct production design and Sandy Powell's vintage costumes. The colors are so dense and rich they nearly pop off the screen, and every scene contains an image or idea worth admiring. The colors of the clothes complement the textures of the movie's homes, furnishings and ripe fall landscapes.

But after a while you may wonder what the point is, and whether this whole exercise is counterproductive. Haynes seems to be bringing up these retro case studies to critique white, straight, conservative America's long history of social repression, and to suggest how a 50s Technicolor soap might have gingerly addressed it. Maybe Haynes is saying that even if 1950s Hollywood movies had been bold enough to dig just beneath the surface of American naivete, they still wouldn't have been able to address social problems frankly, because American society was not sophisticated enough. If this was his point, it's a valid, original one-but I'm not convinced that a two-hour, obsessively directed feature film was the best place to make it.