Magnificent Obsession

If you're keeping count, Todd Haynes's Far from Heaven is the third film released this fall to steal style and sensibility from '50s Hollywood. François Ozon drapes his pulpy 8 Women in the era's female stereotypes, revealing only that he is a sucker for reel women. Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love splinters saturated '50s colors with Naughts noise, but by the end his male weepie is wriggling, like its blue-suited protagonist, into the deep maternal bosom of cold-war fantasy. Haynes himself pretty much remakes All That Heaven Allows by the master of '50s melodrama, Douglas Sirk. So how does he manage to remain unseduced by the mores of that decade--to the point where he can critique society past and present?

Partly it's because of his deep allegiance to Sirk. Ozon and Anderson appropriate the vivid colors and high emotionalism of Sirk films like Imitation of Life and Magnificent Obsession (themselves remakes of John Stahl's '30s films). Haynes goes further to acknowledge the social analysis of a director who devoted the final 15 minutes of his final weepie to a black maid's bitter death and funeral.

Sirk fled Nazi Germany in the '30s with his Jewish wife. His sumptuous Hollywood films accept the dream of postwar American serenity only to expose the tragedies of the dreamers: success without fulfillment, twisted family dynamics, cruel social exclusions. All That Heaven Allows centers on a prosperous Connecticut widow with grown children: When she takes up with her tree trimmer, a younger man of a lower class, she is trashed by the town and rejected by her offspring. Of course, she dumps the guy. Sirk rewards her, brilliantly, with a television--that atomizing dream dealer.

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Haynes's update raises the stakes more than a bit, as you'd expect from the director of the flaming Velvet Goldmine and the frigid Safe. Cathy (Julianne Moore) is married with two school-age children. Her husband Frank (Dennis Quaid) works in sales and is often home late. The adorably curvy Cathy runs her family and staff with brisk affection; she's written up in a society magazine as being "nice to Negroes." Then Cathy walks in on Frank kissing another man in his office. Raw with shame, she confides in her gardener Raymond (Dennis Haysbert), one of those Negroes she's been so nice to. A catty acquaintance spies her with Raymond, and the dream world falls apart.

The narrative takes a few unbelievable leaps: Would any upper-class white housewife of the '50s--however hurt by her husband or self-righteous about her lack of prejudice--go out dancing with a black man and be surprised about the consequences? Yet artifice is admitted in every frame of this movie; Haynes isn't interested in a dreaming audience. He wants to keep the viewer aware that films, as much as social conventions, are constructed visions of reality: hence Cathy's gorgeous, hyperreal clothes (costume designer Sandy Powell also worked on Orlando), so nipped in at the waist that Moore is all tits and hips. Hence the film's plush colors and fierce shadows. The soppy strings. The heightened acting, which is almost stylized, almost cold. And the very idea of remaking a movie.

Sirk's trick--which Haynes more than capably duplicates--was to use actresses who could locate the human in the artifice, who could make "tragic" feel tragic. Moore has been coasting for a while on her maternal-sexy persona, but here Haynes asks her to see it as a shell. And, dang, she gets it. Better yet, she finds a more fluid self underneath, a self struggling to get out. There are moments between Cathy and Haysbert's Raymond that speak as achingly of black and white division and longing as any Spike Lee face-off. Quaid seems less comfortable; it's not clear whether the role or his performance is superficial. Certainly Frank gets what he wants without worrying much about consequences.

As a gay filmmaker, Haynes has never sentimentalized gayness. He also ensures here that the too-wonderful Raymond takes flak from both white and black bigots. Cathy is obviously trapped in a weak femininity policed by other women and cordoned off by men; at the same time, she's blind to her own privilege and power to hurt. Each character's oppression and failings illuminates the others' in a complex and intelligent mesh of sorrow.

So it's odd that Far From Heaven is such a comforting, even exhilarating movie. Haynes wrote the script when the United States was again enjoying the economic prosperity and façade of social equality that marked the '50s; no doubt he hoped, like Sirk, to poke holes in his audience's complacency. In these days of upheaval, however, the movie reads in an unexpected way. It presents visions of meetings--vulnerable meetings between unlike types--that are absolutely wounding and absolutely necessary. It shows how endless repercussions may result from one such meeting. It argues that change is created not just by civic leaders, but by individuals who decide to risk loving.