Far from Heaven, directed by Todd Haynes, is a
remarkably effective recreation of 1950s America as observed through the medium
of a Douglas Sirk movie. The Sirk in question is his 1956 production All That
Heaven Allows, starring Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson, the film that also supplied
the inspiration for Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Ali--Fear Eats the Soul. Yet
Far from Heaven shows what might be called the
other side of Sirk, by touching upon a number of subjects that were generally
taboo on the screen in those days, most conspicuously homosexuality and
interracial romance. Not that the facts themselves were absent from the American
scene--but they constituted a blind spot in what official cultural organs such
as the movies or the media chose to see.
Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore) and her husband
Frank (Dennis Quaid) are a model couple living in an upscale Connecticut
community in 1957. He has an executive position at a local firm, and she
presides over a household replete with two lovable offspring that could have
jumped out of the pages of Better Homes and Gardens. Unfortunately, Frank is a
closeted gay whom she accidentally finds in the arms of another man when she
pays an unexpected visit to the office one evening. Disoriented by her
discovery, she seeks solace in the company of her black gardener, Raymond Deagen
(Dennis Haysbert) whom she has already befriended. Their relationship hardly
reaches the stage of a flirtation, but when she is seen in his company by a
local gossip, the occurrence is enough to precipitate the latent racism in the
community.
In the meantime, Frank agrees to undergo
psychotherapy in hope of straightening out his sexuality. But this attempt fails
after he meets an attractive young man when he and Cathy go to Florida for a New
Year's vacation. At the end, Cathy and Frank are in the process of getting a
divorce and Raymond decides to leave town after his daughter is attacked by some
white boys. Cathy and Raymond see each other for one last time at the train
station as he and his child are departing for Baltimore. In a conclusion far
more reminiscent of Max Ophuls or Jacques Demy than Sirk, there is only the most
remote glimmering of hope for the pair ever being reunited in a world that
certainly is "Far from Heaven."
No one needs to have seen
All That Heaven Allows--available on an excellent DVD from Criterion--to appreciate
Far from Heaven. But it is worth noting some significant differences already implicit in
the difference between their respective titles. In the older movie,
Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) is a forty-ish widow who falls in love with her
gardener, Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson), a Thoreau-reading hunk who is somewhat
younger than she. What arouses the wrath of the community is not only the
difference in class, although Kirby is a prosperous businessman and no mere
hired hand, but also the impropriety of a widow consorting with a young
stud--this is the USA in the 1950s, remember. Even for the Eisenhower years, All
That Heaven Allows is very light stuff in comparison with a movie like Nicholas
Ray's Rebel Without a Cause.
In his review of Far from Heaven in The Village
Voice (11/6-12/02), J. Hoberman characterized All That Heaven Allows as "a
sort of bourgeois Lady Chatterley's Lover." That seems a bit
exaggerated to me, but sexual frustration lay at the root of many novels and
plays of the period--it is only necessary to think of the stage hits of
Tennessee Williams and William Inge. The year before the Sirk came out, a classier
version of the same scenario, David Lean's Summertime, based upon a play by
Arthur Laurents, starring Katherine Hepburn, had a huge success with
both critics and the public. It would be more accurate to call All That Heaven
Allows a bourgeois Summertime, with downtown USA taking the place of Venice, and
a homegrown Rock Hudson substituting for the worldly Italian gigolo played by
Rossano Brazzi.
But there the difference ceases. The moral of
both movies is that what a lone older woman needs more than anything else is a
good man in her bed. However, in Summertime, far more of a tear-jerker in this
regard than All That Heaven Allows, the heroine has to nobly return home at the
end of her summer vacation, with only the memory of her affair to keep her warm
on cold nights. At least Cary got to keep Ron Kirby, unlike Hepburn's Jane
Hudson, who had to give up Renato de Rossi. In the suffocating cultural
and ideological atmosphere of those not so happy days, being unable to get laid
could serve as a code for all of the repressed woes of the country. In the
mid-1950s, only Norman Mailer in The Deer Park attempted to suggest some of the
possible connections between sexual and political repression during the Cold War
era.
Hardly less typical of the period is the struggle between
conformity and individualism in All That Heaven
Allows. Ron Kirby, that ardent
admirer of Thoreau, is presented as an embodiment of rugged manhood who thinks
for himself and leads his life as he pleases, without giving a damn for public
opinion. But the actual price anyone paid for this kind of
independence--particularly if the person was not a respectable white member of
the community--was articulated in memorable lines a year or so later by Allen
Ginsberg in his chant of lamentation for his own lost generation: "I saw
the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical
naked...."
Ginsberg's Inferno is a far cry from Sirk's
Technicolor® Paradiso, but not quite as distant from Haynes's Purgatorio. In content, the movie has less in common with
Sirk's melodramas than it does with John Cheever's brilliant series of short
stories set in the imaginary Connecticut suburb called Shady Hill. In the
ironically titled "The Country Husband," the main character, Francis
Weed, lusts after his teenage babysitter and dreams of giving up his executive
job to lead a bohemian life in Europe. At the conclusion, however, Francis seeks
help from a psychotherapist, and takes up woodworking as a way of resolving his
existential Angst. Faced with ostracism and financial ruin, Francis
capitulates to the powers that be.
In contrast to Cheever's protagonist, Cathy and
Frank are accepting second best solutions to their problems less out of
cowardice than from an inability to imagine anything better.
Yet they do not deserve the blame for their unhappy condition. Where Sirk's
characters often give the impression of being trapped in their
multicolored heaven, Cathy and Frank are emphatically prisoners, prisoners of
the time in which they live. Perceiving the discrepancy between the longings,
themselves highly contradictory, of these two characters and the actual
historical situation in which the couple find themselves, an audience today can
only experience this discrepancy as irony. Even in a
friendlier environment, Cathy and Raymond could not easily settle down together,
and Frank seems bound for a rocky future in his relationship with a younger man.
Just as Cheever created his most impressive effects
by subtly shifting the material of a typical John O'Hara short story, giving an
often telling cultural relief to the situations, Haynes has done something quite
similar in his film, adding a dimension totally absent in Sirk.
I know Sirk's admirers--more numerous today than
in the 1950s--will retort that his pictures are nothing but ironic. In my
opinion, however, this is an optical illusion. The interview with Sirk that
accompanies the DVD of All That Heaven Allows makes it clear that he intended
the reference to Thoreau in the movie to be taken quite seriously. By contrast,
in Far from Heaven the scene of a reception at an art gallery that features a
shot of a Miró painting with a pack of shallow culture vultures lurking in the
background functions much like the badly played Beethoven sonata that serves as
a recurrent motif in "The Country Husband". In either case, nothing
could clash more flagrantly with the cultural poverty of the milieu than these
discrete allusions to an other than natural "outside". And that kind
of irony is inconceivable in a Sirk movie.
I would not necessarily call Far from Heaven a
"warm" film--that was much more Sirk's affair--but it regards its
characters compassionately, without patronizing them. Haynes, no doubt keeping
in mind Thoreau's famous dictum that most men lead lives of quite desperation, manages to steer an
even course in his observation of middle class American mores. He never descends
to the cheap caricatures of Sam Mendes' American Beauty or Neil LaBute's
Your Friends and Neighbors, but neither does he succumb to the hard-nosed cynicism of Todd
Solondz' Happiness. Most importantly, he is aided by an excellent cast,
headed by Julianne Moore and Dennis Quaid.
Moore has justly received high praise for her
performance as Cathy. God knows she is nearer to Katherine Hepburn in dramatic
ability than the mediocre Jane Wyman! If I found Dennis Quaid only a little less
impressive as Frank, it is because this is Cathy's story and not her husband's.
Quaid is a very strong actor, who was quite good as the father in the
misbegotten Frequency, and with his faint resemblance to Fred McMurray, he makes
a perfect choice for this part. When he falteringly admits his love for another
man to his wife towards the end of Far from Heaven, his cry of agony resounds
with unadorned pathos since he has made the audience grasp how much it costs
Frank to utter this confession.
Todd Haynes has always been a director with a
strong sense of visuals--just think about the tribute to Jean Genet in Poison
or the mise en scene in Velvet Goldmine--and he has a field day in this
movie with the extravagantly kitschy interiors that passed for high style in
the 1950s. And the gifted cinematographer Edward Lachmann has served him well
with darkly saturated colors that at moments recall the hues of period
processing by Metrocolor or Deluxe. But Haynes understands that what is at
stake here is more than a decorative recreation of the past. Sirk's
U-I spectacles are a depraved artistic vision; Haynes turns the very resources
Sirk had employed in creating his false paradise against the same
material to reveal the walls of a prison which is no less one because the
characters have contributed to building it themselves.
Douglas Sirk's All That
Heaven Allows and Todd Haynes's Poison, The Velvet Goldmine and Far
from Heaven are available on DVD from Amazon.com
Production
data courtesy of The Internet Movie Database
Home
E-mail Dave:
daveclayton@worldnet.att.net