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Far From Heaven
by Glenn Kenny
www.premiere.com

It would be a shame if moviegoers were to miss out on the deep, complex pleasures of Todd Haynes's remarkable Far From Heaven out of fear that they might not appreciate what is being touted as its biggest hook-the fact that Haynes has styled this movie after the melodramas of the '50s, particularly those directed by the brilliant Douglas Sirk (Magnificent Obsession, Written on the Wind).

This is a genre almost anybody who's gone channel-surfing at 2 a.m. should have a passing familiarity with, but Haynes, like a lot of buffs, positively loves the stuff, and seeing him play with its conventions is a big part of the movie's appeal.

But Far From Heaven is a lot more than a formalist exercise. It's a study of the dynamics of prejudice, and the unfathomable absurdity of any kind of bigotry. Presiding over a seemingly perfect household in '50s Connecticut, affluent housewife Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore) sees her world start to fall apart when she discovers that her executive-suite husband (Dennis Quaid) is an increasingly less-repressed homosexual. This being the '50s, Quaid's character half-heartedly submits to a psychiatric cure; no sooner has he demanded Cathy's forbearance on the whole matter than he flips out over the fact that Cathy has gone so far as to actually have a conversation with their black gardener (Dennis Haysbert).

To say that Haynes allows his characters to get hit harder than they would in the likes of Sirk's All That Heaven Allows is to suggest that Sirk soft-pedaled his material, which in fact he didn't (take a look at the confrontation between Troy Donahue and Susan Kohner in Imitation of Life, for instance). What Haynes does here is test how far the limits of the genre can be stretched. But unlike Haynes's last feature, Velvet Goldmine, this isn't an entirely theoretical project. And all theory aside, it's worth seeing for Quaid's multileveled, perfectly modulated, frankly amazing performance. If he doesn't get a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for this, then the members of the Academy should all wind up as far from heaven as possible.

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