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November
8, 2002, 10:30 a.m. |
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From Heaven is one of the most peculiar movies I've ever seen
— and given that I've seen pro-life Filipino vampire movies and Japanese
samurai movies featuring a ninja shlepping around a baby carriage with
booby traps all over it, that's saying a lot. Writer-director Todd Haynes
takes extraordinary care to recreate the tone and style of a certain type
of film popular in the 1950s. Then he spends the entire course of the
movie, which opens this weekend, complaining that the genre he is fetishizing
right before our eyes — the big, florid, overripe melodramas that
usually starred Rock Hudson — refused to confront the reality of
life.
Julianne Moore is a perfectly coiffed and dressed corporate housewife in 1957 Hartford. Her husband, Dennis Quaid, is a fast-rising star at a company called Magnatech. He's tormented by homosexual yearnings. Over the course of the movie, Julianne finds solace and companionship in the company of her gardener, a dignified and educated Dennis Haysbert. He's black. Tongues wag. Her friends desert her. His friends throw bricks through his window.
There's a motion-picture director you've never heard of who's the real subject of Haynes's movie. His name was Douglas Sirk. He made most of those Rock Hudson melodramas, and there are books and essays and academic studies and frame-by-frame analyses of Sirk's work written by people who really should have found something a mite more productive to do with their lives. They even coined an adjective to describe his style, which mostly involves cameras slowly panning in, out and around mirrors to suggest the dual lives of his characters. The word is "Sirkian."
I'd like to coin an adjective in response. That adjective is "Get-a-life-ian."
Far From Heaven stands as the most expensive and obsessive academic study of Douglas Sirk — or just about anything else — ever undertaken. It stitches together some of the plot and situation from two Sirk films, All That Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life, and then brings out themes that Sirk-fanciers believe were hiding in the celluloid closet. You see, in the 1950s, gay men had to live furtive lives and racism was rampant. But Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s refused to show us such things. Instead, we had to watch Rock Hudson feign interest in women (as in All That Heaven Allows) when we now know he was gay and watch a young black girl pass for white (as in Imitation of Life).
This might be a useful exercise in polemic if Americans were still fascinated by Rock Hudson movies. But why exactly should we care that overwrought 1950s melodramas didn't grapple openly with issues like homosexuality and racism? What possible difference does it make to an audience watching Far From Heaven in 2002?
It makes no difference, of course. People who go to see Far From Heaven will simply be watching its characters interact and its plot unfold without any knowledge of the work of Douglas Sirk. So the question is: Does Far From Heaven work as a movie?
The answer is: Yes and no. It's absolutely gorgeous to look at and listen to (watch next March as 80-year-old composer Elmer Bernstein collects his first Oscar for the musical score). And much of Far From Heaven is surprisingly affecting. Julianne Moore is sensationally good as the proper housewife whose life begins to crumble around her. But the really stunning performance here is by Dennis Quaid, who completely disappears inside his tormented, enraged, sadistic, pathetic, glad-handing, hopeful, and hopeless character. After a decade of wandering aimlessly, Quaid has found himself again as an actor in what can only be described as a definitive performance.
But Haynes's obsession with mimicking the conventions of the Sirk movies forces a terrifically problematic tone onto Far From Heaven. There are times when the dialogue and acting are so dreadful that you laugh at it. But are you laughing at it or laughing with it? Does Haynes want us to feel superior to his characters, or is Haynes so buried deep inside his magnificent obsession that he doesn't know how these scenes play?
Despite Haynes's insistence on distancing us from his characters so that we can see through the artifice, the actors and situations are real and painful enough to involve us. We come to care for these people, even though Haynes keeps telling us they're merely cogs in a monstrous Hollywood machine.
Haynes's failure
of tone will be explained away by Far From Heaven's partisans as
part of his effort to capture the mood of the Douglas Sirk movies. But
that's a crock. And indeed, Far From Heaven is a crock, though
an enjoyable one.
— Mr.
Podhoretz is a columnist for the New
York Post.