`Far From Heaven' has been compared to the Jane Wyman tear jerker, `All That Heaven Allows' but a closer comparison would be `Pleasantville'. The operating word here is 'convention'. `Pleasantville' saw through it, rejected it, and was highly praised. `Far From Heaven' resists the revisionist plan and, consequently, will not be as popular a movie. This is a time capsule of the way America acted in the post-cold war 1950s, a time when integration was new and threatening and homosexuality was a disease to fight and be cured of. The conventional family unit consisted of a hard-working successful businessman-father (Dennis Quaid), his socially known and glamorous homemaking-wife (Julianne Moore), her steadfast neighbor and best friend (Patricia Clarkson) and two dutifully children, one male and one female, of liked age to perfectly balance the situation. There was the typical American town, Hartford, where, again by convention, the whites and the blacks knew their place and where integration was an abstract thought. Finally, there was homosexuality, which by convention, was more a rare disease among artists than it was commonly seen in everyday life. Todd Haynes projects this movie as it would have been made in the 1950s, from the tidy, pretentious dialogue down to the gasps of indignation at a black man talking much less riding in a car with a white woman, to the fake scenes of the automobile rear view mirror. Yet it is the issue of homosexuality and a black man having anything to do with a white woman that Haynes would have us ponder over. It certainly would not have passed the movie censors then but, today, would seem to be an unnecessary reminder of how times have changed. It seems that Haynes can't have it both ways.
Review of Far from Heaven
