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Paradise Found
For Todd Haynes, the best thing about living in Portland is it’s very far from Hollywood
by Joseph Gallivan
The Portland Tribune
2002

BY Issue date: 11/15/2002
The Tribune

Film director and writer Todd Haynes didn’t spend the biggest weekend of his career in Los Angeles, whooping it up with big studio suits. Last Saturday night, after being dealt a royal flush of positive notices at the debut of his new film, “Far From Heaven,” he spent the evening in a dirty warehouse in Old Town, no entourage in sight, sipping a can of Hamm’s and listening to three lectures on transportation.
The previous day, The New York Times had gone gaga: “‘Far From Heaven’ … rediscovers the aching, desiring humanity in a genre — and a period — too often subjected to easy parody or ironic appropriation. In a word, it’s divine.”
Rex Reed of The New York Observer gushed like a 1950s TV salesman, “Every element in ‘Far From Heaven’ harmonizes, in the kind of colossal achievement that revives my faith in movies and keeps me coming back for more.”
And everyone already is talking of lead actress Julianne Moore as an Oscar contender. “What Moore does with her role is so beyond the parameters of what we call great acting that it nearly defies categorization,” the Los Angeles Times said.
Saturday night’s events were held at the home of the art collective Ye Dirty Old Lab Shoppe, the sort of unpretentious-on-the-inside place that endears Haynes to the city.
“I met a lot of people really quickly, pretty exceptional, supersmart, creative people,” he said at a junket at the Heathman Hotel, referring to his first days here. Portlanders were different in that “they wanted to know what I was like as a person before what I did.
“I think the reasons why people choose to be here say a lot about who they are and why they choose to do their work.”
After 15 years in New York and critical success with films such as “Safe” (1995) and “Velvet Goldmine” (1999), Haynes had reached a point where his identity was too tied up in being a filmmaker. Added to this, all of his friends had found their ideal piece of real estate, whereas “I never found that synchronicity with a location that was going to make me feel settled.”
Haynes, 41, had the classic “Hello, flowers! Hello, trees!” conversion to Portland. When a friend lent him a house at Northwest 23rd Avenue and Johnson Street in early 2000, he fell in love with the city and wrote the first draft of “Far From Heaven” in 10 days.
He gets lyrical as he remembers the final miles of his cross-country drive from New York, barreling down the gorge into the sunset. Not many film directors risk their whole career based on the light in Portland.
“It was based on the lurve in Portland!” he says with a laugh. “It was about the space and the people.” Hikes in Forest Park followed, along with new friends and then the purchase of his own “gorgeous 1909 Arts and Crafts bungalow” off Northeast Ainsworth Street. Work took him to New Jersey for shooting the new movie, and to Los Angeles for postproduction, but he’s glad to be home.

Love festers in the ’burbs

At $14 million, “Far From Heaven” is Haynes’ biggest budget movie so far. The film is richly color-coded, and the homes and offices depicted are late-1950s period pieces.
Douglas Sirk movies such as “Magnificent Obsession,” “Imitation of Life” and “All That Heaven Allows” were glamorous when they came out but today are cable-channel comfort food.
Haynes uses their style, right down to the cursive credits and the sweeping orchestral score, to explore our feelings about love and taboos today. Everything looks new and progressive, almost 1960s-ish, except for the social mores of the Connecticut suburbia on display:
Cathy and Frank Whitaker (Julianne Moore and Dennis Quaid) are the perfect couple, except that he’s a secret drunk and a closet homosexual, which drives her into the arms of her black gardener (Dennis Haysbert).
It sounds laughable. At September’s preview screening at Cinema 21, where Haynes’ friends had a third of the theater, the audience did enjoy the dramatic irony, snickering at the clueless Eisenhower-era chumps and their stilted speech.
Haynes said he sat by a 24-year-old who chuckled knowingly through most of the film (there are plenty of gay gags about Palm Springs and fabulous Miami) until a tender moment between Cathy and the gardener brought the young man to tears.
Though “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story” (1987) and “Poison” (1991) made him a pioneer of new queer cinema, Haynes’ art has moved well beyond sexual identity politics.
“I knew my friends here would appreciate the film intellectually and visually,” Haynes says, “but they’re all about 10 years younger than me, and I didn’t necessarily know that it would really get to them that way. And so many of them were all so teary at the end, saying, ‘I don’t think that I want to have drinks, I’m just really sad, and I just want to think about it. It’s beautiful.’ You know, all broken up — it was really touching to me, real sweet.”

At odds with Hollywood

To Haynes, the greatest triumph is getting an audience to feel sadness, loss and love in what he calls “the adrenaline pumped-up era we live in.”
It’s worth warning audiences that Haynes’ films still are largely art house material. They are slow, often boring, and they usually have a complicated point to make about the nature of the postmodern human subject (see the end of “Safe,” where the housewife suffering from an allergy to the 20th century has a Lacanian epiphany in front of the bathroom mirror).
People attracted by the gorgeous palette of the poster from “Far From Heaven,” or the promise of Bowie-meets-Iggy glam in “Velvet Goldmine,” could be disappointed.
Part of what Haynes is fighting is Hollywood’s new laziness. “Whether it’s an emotional film, dramatic or action film, they preprogram how you are supposed to feel,” he says. “They kind of do all the work for you. You see every emotional beat coming, then you feel slightly cheated or a little bit disappointed to fall into it. There’s a way in which it robs you of something of your own.”
Yes, the postmodernists are coming! Haynes studied semiotics at Brown University in the 1980s (as did Ira Glass, Jeffrey Eugenides and Rick Moody), and it shows. He seems to have a thing for French philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s reception theory, which stresses that the viewer is active in making the meaning of any text.
“If ‘Far From Heaven’ were done in a typical way today,” Haynes says, “Cathy would have to have a moment of verbalized realization at the end, like ‘Sybil, this is a rough world we live in, but I’ve learned this and this and this … .’ And these movies of the period never do that. They’re like pre-psychological; the characters are moved around by the forces of their society. They’re very vulnerable people; they’re not heroic.”

Offers he can refuse

Haynes says it’s unlikely he’ll ever do a mainstream Hollywood movie, although the offers coming in are amusing. “There’s a Reese Witherspoon movie — I love her, too — about a girl who gets abused and then she gains 300 pounds and goes into recovery and has a relationship with a bike messenger or something.”
Then there’s a remake of “Strangers on a Train” with women, set on a plane. The third is “an LAPD exposé where they bring in a criminal, and he happens to have the winning lottery ticket, and so all the cops conspire a way for them to get the money, and then some good, like Serpico, cop comes in and figures out how to expose the corruption.” Nothing very Haynesian there then.
His next movie? “I have this idea for a weird biopic of Bob Dylan. It’s not even a biopic. It’s all these multiple characters who kind of are all Dylan and none of them are Dylan. Each character is set in a different time; some are fantastical, like the 1870s.”
It sounds guaranteed to annoy the rock establishment. “It’s very deranged. That’s why Dylan said yes. And he never says yes to anything.”

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