At the Movies - 'Far From Heaven'

The Associated Press

"Far From Heaven" easily would have been one of the year's best films, based solely on its exquisite cinematography and production design.

Add an Oscar-worthy performance from Julianne Moore, and writer-director Todd Haynes' keenly observant script, and you have a movie that's nearly flawless.

Haynes' loving homage to the Technicolor female-driven melodramas of the 1950s looks and feels so authentic, it will make you forget you're watching a new movie.

You'll think you're watching a film by a German director whose heyday was in the '50s -- Douglas Sirk, known for his visually rich, high-minded soap operas with a conscience, including "Magnificent Obsession" and "Imitation of Life."

"Far From Heaven" clearly uses Sirk's "All That Heaven Allows" as a launching pad. The 1955 film starred Jane Wyman as a wealthy New England widow who falls for her good-looking (and much younger) gardener, played by Rock Hudson.

Vicious whispers among the country club set tear them apart -- he's her gardener, imagine! -- but she comes to realize that love is more important than social status.

Haynes, who made the 1998 film "Velvet Goldmine" and previously directed Moore in 1995's "Safe," pours gas on what was then an incendiary topic by injecting issues of sexual orientation and race.

Moore is pitch-perfect as Cathy Whitaker, a housewife and mother of two who appears to have the ideal marriage to TV sales executive Frank (Dennis Quaid) in 1957 Connecticut.

But one night -- after a series of nights in which Frank is working late -- Cathy shows up at the office with his dinner neatly packed in Tupperware, and finds him kissing a man. Naturally, she's devastated, but must maintain the plastic, pastel veneer, so she sends Frank to a doctor for "heterosexual transformation." (This includes psychiatric sessions, and if those don't fix him, the doctor tells him electroshock therapy will surely do the trick.)

At the same time, Cathy begins a tender, tentative friendship with her gardener, Raymond (Dennis Haysbert) -- who's black, and the widower father of a young girl.

When she's seen talking to him at an art exhibit, where he surprises her with his insightful interpretation of a Miro painting, the town goes into a tizzy. It doesn't matter that he's intelligent, kind and attractive -- he is, as they call him, a Negro. And her relationship with him, however chaste, drags her from party-planning socialite to social pariah -- and it threatens the safety of Raymond and his little girl.

It's easy to sit in the audience and snicker at the closed-mindedness; it's so archaic, it almost seems quaint. But really, in many ways, we're not that far removed from such Eisenhower-era misconceptions and prejudices. Episodes of "Montel Williams" and "Jerry Springer" are devoted to members of the hoi polloi shocking each other with confessions of sexual confusion and interracial romance, and some of us watch with car-wreck fascination.

Haynes' script transports us back to that time, and not just with expressions like "Where on Earth is your father?" and "I'm at my wit's end." It's what his characters don't say that conveys deeper meaning -- the polite banter that disguises their repressed fears and desires.

Besides the dialogue, every detail is perfect -- from the legendary Elmer Bernstein's sweeping, string-heavy score, to Cathy's baby-blue station wagon and her matching gloves and handbags, to the busybody neighbors, to the children who are rarely seen and heard even less.

And the colors -- my God, the colors!

Cinematographer Edward Lachman ("Erin Brockovich") achieves astonishing shades of red and green that couldn't possibly exist. And because the film takes place in the fall, during New England's peak foliage season, the leaves are such a bright yellow, they're practically radioactive.

That hyperreal look provides the perfect contrast to the substantive issues with which the characters are grappling.

"Far From Heaven," a Focus Features release, is rated PG-13 for mature thematic elements, sexual content, brief violence and language. Running time: 107 minutes.

Four stars out of four.