Ray Pride

"Far From Heaven" is a miracle, an unlikely proof of Borges' unflappably wry short story, "Pierre Menard, the Author of Quixote," in which his driven protagonist attempts to write Cervantes' "Don Quixote" word for word in the modern age. (Gus van Sant, vamping, said that was the rationale for his "Psycho" remake.)

How does this apply to the tear-stained new picture from Todd Haynes, the audacious 41-year-old director of the refined, severe "Safe" and the gaudy, bombastic "Velvet Goldmine"? It's suburban 1950s America, as reflected in studio high style, recreated (notably by cinematographer Ed Lachman) with contemporary film stocks, lenses and actors. The result is a near-perfect postmodern specimen that lives, breathes, soars. It's as if an authentic new Kabuki play were performed, a Greek myth invented, not discovered. "Far From Heaven" is an anachronism of the highest order, assembling a defunct set of signifiers into an emotional marvel, a delirious, grandiloquent, sweeping success.

Yeah. It's about the power of the unrequited, what we hold inside when we want to shout it to the world. Julianne Moore is a strait-laced housewife whose husband (Dennis Quaid, brave, brilliant and glorious in every moment of his multiple drunk scenes) has certain secrets; those misprisions, loosed, allow Moore to realize that the most complete man in her sphere is her black gardener (Dennis Haysbert, civility and kindness itself). Complications, as in Douglas Sirk's "All That Heaven Allows" or "Written on the Wind," are sudden and public. It's often assumed that to be ironic means to be false, but Sirk's films, particularly this pair you can visit on Criterion DVD, are deeply emotional, steeped in the director's European theater training, from his knowledge of Greek tragedy to his mounting of early productions of Brecht.

They're hyper, and I love hyper things. "And this is a hyper things kind of movie," Haynes tells me a few weeks after Toronto journalists couldn't stop blabbing about awards instead of the movie's substantial accomplishment. "That's a whole new universe for Todd! It's easier to just focus on how much more deserving Julianne is and how deserving [composer] Elmer Bernstein is."

It all leaves him stammering, this dose of E! But c'mon, the guy studied semiotics at Brown. Can't he talk about Brecht's distancing effect via Sirk as well as late master Rainer Werner Fassbinder? "Ultimately, it's not my intention to distance," he says, working through a cold with a tight little hand-rolled cigarette. "Sometimes, the more you distance, the closer you get to true emotions."

What's that dialectic, I wonder? It isn't life, our experience; it's representation, atop representation. The actors seem like our way into that. "Right, right. That's the first and most important place to go, obviously. You find actors who can negotiate this kind of performance and make it real and commit to it in very specific ways that aren't asked of you when you do a more naturalistic style." He puts the ash aside. "I think that whenever we feel anything in a movie, it's not the movie doing it for you, it's a relationship between you, the spectator, and what's happening on the screen. The narrative and visual language on the screen is, as it usually is, of the contemporary moment, defined by the naturalism that is most invisible to us in that moment. You're not asked to look at the fact that it's a series of artifices, of artificial choices that are being made for you. In many ways, I think you often expect the film to do that for you, to make you feel things for you, because you're not also seeing that it's a plastic medium that's been manipulated. When you are introducing, or re-introducing, audiences to a certain outmoded style, you see it as something artificial and plastic, and in a weird way, I think it invites an interaction with the two. I don't even know exactly how that happens, except that I think there's something about the melodramatic form that doesn't resolve itself the way we expect movies to today. There is not the kind of psychological necessity [to explain things in reductionist terms]. The characters in the Sirk films never have that sort of Aristotelian articulation of what they've learned. And it does put it in your lap as a viewer and it provides a space for music and color and stylistic elements to supplement what characters can't say. But it also, I think, elicits something more from an audience than films that sort of do it all for you."

When I go to movies, I usually want the speed and vitality of contemporary life, and the prospect of period pictures by filmmakers I like usually scares me, when they're off on "hat movies." Barbet Schroeder says the prospect drives him mad, since he'd never be able to definitively say what kind of chairs the characters would sit in. Haynes laughs. "[Producer] Christine [Vachon] calls them doily pictures, the Merchant-Ivory approach." The knack, it seems, is the acting, the presence; you lose track of the artifice of the look. "It doesn't overwhelm it and block your access to the content, the material," he says. "It's all about those performances that are all so beautifully restrained and calibrated. Julianne describes it really interestingly. This kind of acting style is very much on the surface, this pre-psychology moment in film where it's not about subtext and repressed instincts. There's something very simple about the people in these films. They're almost incapable of coloring and concealing what they're feeling and thinking. Even the meter of the language. When you commit to the language and respect it, then it sounds of a piece and it works."

"Far From Heaven" opens Friday.

(2002-11-13)

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