Magnificent obsession
Todd Haynes cracks perfection in Far from Heaven.

By Johnny Ray Huston

IT'S AN IRONY worthy of Douglas Sirk: today, the films of the director who provided perhaps the most scathing anti-TV image of the '50s are most often seen on TV. In Sirk's 1955 All That Heaven Allows, widowed suburban housewife Jane Wyman's lonely face is reflected in a turned-off television, the callous Christmas gift that her college-age children give her – after thwarting her romance with young gardener Rock Hudson – so she has a form of "company" that isn't socially frowned on.

Almost 50 years later, you can flick a switch and replace your own gray-mirrored reflection with that image. All That Heaven Allows, Magnificent Obsession, Written on the Wind, and Imitation of Life have become AMC channel fare, to a degree that Sirk retrospectives in movie houses are now rare. In fact, when Sirk's work makes a cameo in Curtis Hanson's new Eminem flick 8 Mile, it's via television. Kim Basinger's glam trailer-park mom paints her nails as her TV screens a scene from Imitation of Life: a mother exposing the hidden racial identity of her daughter in a particularly American theater of cruelty – an elementary school classroom. If the cutting awkwardness of that moment spilled Ring-like from the television into the rest of the movie, 8 Mile would be more than the fraudulent great white hope story it is.

But in channeling Sirk and sending scrambled signals, so to speak, Hanson is far from alone. The past few years have brought a minirevival of sorts, as different directors re-cite his original, populist version of Bertolt Brecht-derived melodrama. Lars von Trier adds his sadistic outlook to the Magnificent Obsession-style blindness theme of Dancer in the Dark. Like All That Heaven Allows, François Ozon's Criminal Lovers and 8 Women both use excitable deer as metaphors for desire, just two of many tiny clever-clever "winks" (to use Ozon's own phrase) that Ozon has made in Sirk's direction.

This week brings the most overt imitation to date, courtesy of Todd Haynes, whose 1987 Superstar exposed the heartaches in the dream homes of Karen Carpenter and Barbie, and whose 1995 Safe was an airtight, toxically antiseptic chamber piece that revealed the Sirk within Stanley Kubrick's auteur name. Set in suburban Connecticut circa 1958, Far from Heaven primarily pays homage to All That Heaven Allows, but its constellation of cinematic influences expands beyond that film to other Sirk movies, other '50s movie motifs (in particular, Max Ophüls's love trains), other Haynes movies, and even another All That Heaven Allows remake, R.W. Fassbinder's 1974 Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.

Yes, Haynes is a director who brings a portfolio of references to the job. But Far from Heaven is more than a semiotic Hallmark card to melodrama, it's an unashamedly florid expression of movie love. The difference is evident in the titles. All That Heaven Allows sounds arch; "As far as I'm concerned, heaven is stingy," the title-obsessed Sirk famously said. Haynes has isolated one earthbound word from that quote – "far" – and created a tribute that exposes the aching desire contained within it. If von Trier beats viewers like a playground bully and Ozon presents fake jewels as tears, Haynes is less cynical, more willing to identify with the impulse to cry.

In Far from Heaven, Julianne Moore plays Cathy Whitaker, the Mrs. of Mr. and Mrs. Magnatech, a couple who, according to airbrushed advertisements, "choose only the best for their home"; her other half is husband Frank (Dennis Quaid), who heads the local branch of the aforementioned TV company. Introduced with his back to the camera, Frank carries a certain secret into shadowy bars and movie houses; only his age prevents him from fitting the '50s euphemism "sad young man." Within the meticulous architecture of Haynes's movie, Frank and Cathy pass through revolving doors to meet betrayal and take elevator rides – always going down – toward a floor marked divorce. But Cathy's fate is also wind-written: on one of many days when the fallen autumn leaves seem to have been sprinkled by an impressionist ghost, her scarf blows into the backyard and winds up in the hands of her gardener, Raymond Deagan (Dennis Haysbert). "The color fits," Raymond tells Cathy, when she asks how he knew it was hers. Unfortunately, the people of Hartford, Conn., don't feel that way about Raymond and Cathy's color combination.

Far from Heaven sets restrictive American racial dichotomies of black and white against a backdrop of vivid color in which art and nature commingle. The many hues of red and blue that Haynes and cinematographer Ed Lachman find in Hartford's suburbia are linked to the Technicolor of All That Heaven Allows. Red, white, and blue combine to create divinity in Joan Miró's Nightingale's Song at Midnight and Morning Rain, a painting that Raymond and Cathy find each other within as the people around them ignorantly stare at more obvious surfaces. Periwinkle, a favorite '50s shade that Hitchcock perversely invokes in Psycho, carries increased emotional weight as the film progresses – by the end, when the brightness of one character's car doesn't "pop" (in Haynes's words) the way it did earlier, it's as if she's driving into a new life.

"The fall nights are a purplish hue – we call it a periwinkle mauve – and then the winter, which becomes an emotional winter for Cathy's character, is a greenish, aquamarine blue," Lachman explains. "Color [functions] as a psychological palette, rather than just pictorially. I use primary green and other primary colors around the relationship of Cathy and Raymond. The colors for Frank are muted and secondary. When Frank goes to a bar, it's mauve and a pea green. If you look at the colors of the bar Raymond takes Cathy to, they're primary green, orange, and yellow – more like the fall leaves. People don't have to literally get all those commentaries, because that's the underlying effect they have."

"We did commit ourselves to a close scrutiny of the Sirk films, and I think we learned the most from stills that we took, digital stills from his films, many, many, many of them," Haynes says. "What you see, especially in All That Heaven Allows – which is maybe the place you least expect it – is this incredibly expressionistic use of shadow with the color. To me, that's Sirk: not just how he uses color, but how he uses heavy, inky foregrounded shadows to etch these characters in their environment. There's a conflation of noir with the Technicolor lushness of melodrama. It's almost like what happens in [Michael Curtiz's 1945] Mildred Pierce, but that movie splits it in half, so there's a film noir framing device and the flashbacks are white, wide shots of the interiors in the houses of these women."

In Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Fassbinder's revision of Sirk is blatantly autobiographical (his lover at the time, El Hedi ben Salem, is cast in the Rock Hudson role, while veteran stage actor Brigitte Mira, whose pudginess is Fassbinder-like, plays the female lead) and less attuned to and restricted by the object-obsessed Hollywood glamour (i.e., American status) that Sirk subverted – a style Fassbinder couldn't afford. But there are echoes of Ali in Far from Heaven: a melancholic, romantic barroom dance shared by Cathy and Raymond; extreme-angled near-still lifes of racist, prejudiced onlookers, which also resemble moments from the "Horror" section of Haynes's 1991 feature-length triptych Poison. "[Ali] is one of my favorite movies ever, and all my films steal from it," Haynes says. "I can catalogue the scenes I've taken directly from Ali."

Asked to differentiate between his and Fassbinder's approaches, Haynes is blunt. "His [Fassbinder's] way is more original, for one thing," he says, laughing. "He sort of envied a kind of love he saw in Sirk's films that he didn't recognize in his own. What's funny is that I don't really see that love in Sirk so overwhelmingly. In fact, the Brigitte Mira performance in Ali is so tender, such a beautiful portrayal. There's great tenderness in her relationship with Ali. For me, the sentiment almost comes by surprise and not regularly in Sirk's movies. There are tearful moments in Imitation of Life, absolutely, but if anything I respond to something clinical, a bit more boldly critical, in Sirk than in Fassbinder."

Haynes's attention to detail – his critical affinity for feminine trappings – takes the form of another dollhouse, or ironic dream home, in Far from Heaven; like Sirk, he presents ideal consumerist surfaces only to crack them, and the movie repays repeated viewings by revealing increasingly subtle fault lines in Cathy and Frank's perfect world – a son whose infatuation with a fellow student innocently mirrors his father's hidden desires, for example. The word "fine" is a form of facade maintenance for Cathy (it's also a favorite word of Moore's '80s-self-help-damaged Safe character, Carol White), and she and Frank are surrounded by the oppressiveness of fine things; in fact, the married couple closest to the Whitakers, Cathy's gossipy best friend Eleanor (the superb Patricia Clarkson) and Frank's competitive coworker Stan (Michael Gaston), share the surname Fine. When one of Far from Heaven's main characters decides to flee cold Hartford for Baltimore, the choice of destination has geographical and historical significance and a touchingly submerged element of cinematic camp (one wonders if he might end up living next door to Hairspray's Tracy Turnblad and Corny Collins).

"[Composer] Elmer Bernstein was amused by how lushly I described almost every entrance of music," Haynes admits, when asked about his minutely detailed screenplay. Perhaps the peak achievement of a movie-scoring career that began, not so coincidentally, in the '50s, Bernstein's music provides a crucial sublime element. Just as Haynes and Lachman's initially garish color schemes gain resonance while they fade, the melodic motifs of Bernstein's score move from near-absurd orchestral pomp to melancholic subtlety. As Frank, Quaid has to convey a Robert Stack-style masculinity crisis without the screamingly obvious symbols (crashing planes, gushing oil wells) that Sirk's films provided. Moore's performance follows the opposite trajectory of Jane Wyman's alienated-to-hopeful journey in All That Heaven Allows – her breathy flirtiness and near-mechanical motherly assurance give way to the cadences of someone struggling toward a voice that actually expresses her feelings. The symbiosis between director and actor is a powerful, established one; Cathy Whitaker has the same initials as Safe's Carol White.

If there's any overtly detectable autobiographical element in Far from Heaven, it can be found in Haynes's recent move to Portland, Ore., a thriving nexus of experimental film and video. Even here, Haynes has taken a cue from Sirk, who brashly inserted Thoreau's philosophies into the domestic melodrama genre: in describing his mood near the end of a 15-year stay in New York City, Haynes tellingly uses another word – "stingy" – that Sirk uttered in relation to the title of All That Heaven Allows, then connects the writing of Far from Heaven's seasonal screenplay to the changing climate he experienced during his first months in Oregon. "It had been a dry winter, and the spring season seemed to go on for months," he says. "The script poured out in 10 days, which is very unlike me. By the end of the year, my sister found me this beautiful arts-and-crafts bungalow on the Northeast side of Portland. There's a garden with plants and flowers growing everywhere. I haven't been happier."

The film he's made is a sad one, though. Far from Heaven's treatment of racism sentimentalizes the fierce candor of Imitation of Life or Ali, in which white entitlement is upbraided – with severe finality in the former film and casual frequency in the latter. Haysbert's character is a romantic embodiment of the ideals Hartford's white residents, who reject him, playact at possessing. Devotion to her children stifles Jane Wyman in All That Heaven Allows, and one of the deepest ironies of Haynes's update stems from how it reconfigures this element. It has been argued – oversimplistically – that Haynes shows women have the least autonomy of Far from Heaven's triad of '50s outsiders or minorities, but the film isn't interested in weighing injustices so much as revealing how societal structures work to reinforce them. Cathy's and Frank's and Raymond's individual attempts at finding happiness collide, and one character's freedom becomes another's punishing trap.

A girly bouquet unveiled at the beginning of the current Republican era's cold, gray, fear-based, and warmongering winter, Far from Heaven may be set in the '50s, but it isn't nostalgic for the era; the film's surfaces and screens are designed to incite code-cracking insight about today's models. "[The movie] is meant to be a provocation to our contemporary situation," Haynes says. "Because I think the '50s have been set up so that we have a built-in sense of superiority about how much more sophisticated we are in relation to a McCarthy-era society. But please, just look at what's happening now. People are doing that, and the film doesn't do that for them. Those questions about how far we've actually come do arise. Movies today have been drumming this cool distance from emotional investment into audiences, and this movie definitely takes a blow at that."