First things first. I haven't ever seen a Douglas Sirk film. Reviewing Far From Heaven without having ever seen a Douglas Sirk film is sort of like reviewing Ran without having read “King Lear.” Douglas Sirk movies have been on the back of my mind ever since they became seriously en vogue with the release of Far From Heaven, but that to-see list of mine is getting seriously long. But you know, I think that I have the general idea. Douglas Sirk films were absurd melodramas that took themselves seriously. The film that Far From Heaven is based on is called All That Heaven Allows and is about a woman who is in love or has an affair or something with her gardener. Rock Hudson plays the gardener in that film. I believe that it was generally known in Hollywood that Rock Hudson was a little “light in the loafers,” as they say in Far From Heaven, but amongst movie audiences he was more of a closeted homosexual. Douglas Sirk liked putting Rock Hudson in his movies, exclusively I guess so that they could have this sort of added subtext. You get a handsome leading man, and he’s secretly gay in real life! It has been said that gay filmmakers like John Waters, Fassbinder (I haven’t seen any of his films either, I have a long list) and the director of Far From Heaven, Todd Haynes, find Sirk films especially fascinating as they were attracted to all this stuff that’s bubbling under the surface but is never able to manifest itself.

Sirk has been praised for revealing the sham of the idealism of the fifties, while at the same time creating a devastating experience for the audience. Fassbinder valued the films for their immediate emotional impact. Haynes said of Far From Heaven, apparently attempting to ape the effects of Sirk, and not as much redirect them, “I want to make a film that will make you just weep.” The melodrama works while the satirical elements of the approach remain pretty much intact. It’s easy to get confused, especially if you have never seen a Sirk film, and have only read about them in an attempt to get prepared for Far From Heaven. Are we going to weep because Haynes plans to manipulate us in the stupidest way possible? Or are we going to weep because we care about the characters in the film, and we find the situation that they are in to be really tragically and realistically sad? It seems pretty obvious to me that the film is aiming for the second. The more I think about it, I don’t think that I could say that any emotional response could really be illegitimate, or that we could be manipulated without thinking about what is going on.

Well, Far From Heaven doesn’t work completely. I did not weep at the film. But it does get under your skin in a very underhanded way. You need a little more briefing before I go into this. The plot to Far From Heaven is pretty simple. A Connecticut housewife is struggling to deal with her husband’s sudden homosexuality, an urge that had been latent for some time now. She develops a friendship with her black gardener in order to find the intimacy, certainly not as much the sex, that she has missed from her husband. Her relationship with him is gossiped about throughout the neighborhood, ruining both her reputation and that of her friend. That’s basically the gist of it. All of this is shown in the tone of a 1950s melodrama. There isn’t really any sense of the 21st century, so to speak; no ironic distance. I really admire that idea and approach. I am still waiting for a blatantly racist film that presents its case without ironic distance. I heard that The Believer was like that; others have told me that that film only gave a taste of what it should be. I want to get all ideas and points of view represented, if not equally, then competently or artfully. Haynes isn’t as much making a novel film through this approach as he is making a challenging one.

You occasionally chuckle at the film. Everyone laughed when Julianne Moore reprimanded her son for saying, “Ah jeez.” There were a few less laughs at the end, which is announced with the title, “The End.” Personally, I think that I chuckled at Dennis Quaid locking the door of his office and pouring some booze in his coffee mug. I also smiled very hard during a scene in gay bar deep in the seedy homosexual underground. The characters seem to be able to indicate if they are gay or not by how they smoke. Or maybe even by virtue of the fact that they smoke. I believe that the only characters in the film who smoke are gay. I’m staring at the cover of Film Comment right now. It features Rebecca Romijn-Stamos of Femme Fatale lighting up a cigarette. She is wearing just a black bra, but the image is not very erotic. Part of it is certainly because she doesn’t show any cleavage. Also, I think that smoking has a sort of sordidness and masculinity to it. She smokes out of defiance to the norm. She is again a Femme Fatale. The smoking by homosexuals in Far From Heaven is then representative of a sordid masculinity that calls attention to itself. They are like tough defiant women.

You begin to see the film in those sort of terms. As having a sort of subtle and deep complexity of dated social insight that would be appropriate in the 1950s. When I interpreted what the film was saying about blacks I found myself really getting into it. Blacks are generally romanticized in the film. They have grown accustomed to their roles as the house servants and caretakers of the whites. The relationship between the housewife and the gardener is similar to one between a child and her nanny. The couple in the film even has a black maid. Black maids have raised generations upon generations of whites. As a caretaker, the gardener also is able to tap into a sense of femininity that eludes most other men. The gardener really doesn’t have much of a need for the housewife. He takes pleasure in taking care of her. In giving her someone to talk to, in cheering her up when she comes to him crying. It really bothers him that they cannot see each other, because he really cares about her. But it is not a tragedy for him. For her it is a tragedy. He is all that she has, and without him, she has nothing. It is an act of kindness that he has this sort of relationship with her. The gardener is the most intelligent person in the film. Haynes gives him all the major speeches, and puts all of his “great insights” in his lips. It is entirely valid to ask what he sees in this woman. He is the healthiest person in the entire film. At first I thought that the film was being politically correct. It is of course only politically correct in a 1957 sense of the word.

In a sense the film is racist, but it is a naïve sort of racism. “I want you to know that me and my husband support equal rights for the Negro,” she tells the gardener. The audience seemed to groan in unison. I tried to cover my ears. My wife tried to cover her eyes. It’s a humiliating scene for everyone. However, it is true to the film’s outlook towards race. The point is that the characters pride themselves on being able to look beyond skin color. The film is heavy on these speeches where everyone gets together. However we know that subtextually their entire relationship is based on race. They are together because blacks love being the Morlocks to our Eloi. They take care of us and run the machinery, allowing us to be dumb and naïve.

The idea that skin color doesn’t matter is a white idea. Color does matter; there are no biological traits associated with it, but there are cultural traits. Being black or white is part of your identity; it is part of who you are. Whether you like it or not, it is not something that you can just ignore. Racism is certainly not a good thing, but I think it is more progressive than this idea that we are all the same. You need to understand that diversity exists before you can, hopefully, tolerate and celebrate it. It is a very difficult concept for whites to comprehend, or even more importantly comfortably accept. This concept is probably one of the most important things that I learned in my pre-social work education.

The film has another subtler if less complicated sense of racism. The maids and the gardener, and the gardener’s daughter, all speak in perfect white English. The other blacks in the film speak blacker English. They are sort of the villains in the film. When they see that the gardener is going with the housewife, they throw rocks through their window. (Generally, the whites and blacks in the film pick on their own to show them their place.) I know that it is a very thin line. What is Black English anyway? At what point are we acknowledging legitimate cultural differences between blacks and whites as opposed to making broad racist generalizations? There is certainly something going on here. The gardener in the film is college-educated and owns his own business. He speaks perfectly. It’s very easy to say that they are basing everything on color, because color seems to superficially be the only thing that separates them.

You can sense that a liberal white filmmaker made the film in 1958. There are ideas in it that have intentionally not been thought out all of the way. The blacks in the film don’t really have any problems. Well, they are certainly invisible. There is a chilling moment in the middle of the film where a drunken dinner party guest explains that integration would never work in Hartford because they don’t have any blacks. Haynes then cuts to a black server stoically ignoring him. There is another moment in the film where a small black child goes wading in a Florida pool. His guardian grabs him and then yells at him. Everybody gets out of the pool, and Haynes shows a brief static shot of the empty water. The moment passes. If it lingered or was commented on it would not be nearly as effective. When I say that the blacks in the film do not have any problems that isn’t to say that they are not oppressed. But, of course, being black is not something that they are struggling with. “I don’t know how you could be the only person in a room,” the housewife explains. “Well, I guess that you grow accustomed to it,” she is answered. When the film is over you find yourself realizing that the gardener is the only one in the film who is going to leave in one piece. I suppose that this is another aspect of the film’s apologetic racism. The blacks in the film are portrayed as so healthy that their doubts or insecurities are being shortchanged and underrepresented. The film critic Roger Ebert talks about how movie roles for minorities have often been overwhelmingly positive, and minority actors and filmmakers have been artistically limited. I’m willing to interpret Far From Heaven not as symptomatic of this but self-conscious and able to subtly bring it to light.

One of the most interesting characters for me was Dennis Quaid’s closet homosexual advertising executive. I talked about how some of the images associated with the homosexual characters remind of the unapologetic and aggressive sexuality of the femme fatale. There is indeed a glimpse of film noir in the character. He’s haunted and angry, even more importantly sort of doomed. He doesn’t now what exactly to do with his feelings. He doesn’t have any idea what it means to be gay; it is a concept that seems to be far beyond his reach. This is by far the juiciest role in the film; Dennis Quaid is able to do his showiest work and put a hold on the possibility of an Oscar nomination. The film has been called the anti-Pleasantville. Now, overall I really do admire Pleasantville more than this film. But I have to concede that there is something undeniably more human and affecting in Quaid’s frustration and naivete towards his homosexuality than, say, William H. Macy’s frustration and naivete as to why his wife isn’t home to make dinner. Quaid plays it realistically, not abstractly. His frustration is richer and more complex. There is a moment in the film where he uses the “f-word” towards his wife in regards to curing his disease. “I just want to get the whole fucking thing over with,” is a close approximation of the entire line. It’s poignant and alarming. He has known the word for sometime now, and has just been too polite to say it. This schtick of the shiny apple having a rotten core has created its own little subgenre. This moment is one of its greatest products.

I think that I found myself the most in sympathy with this character. When he tells his wife that he thought that he could beat this disease for both her and the kids, but couldn’t, you feel his sense of failure. It’s the epitome of pessimism in an extraordinarily pessimistic film. It was very difficult for me to admire and get into the Julianne Moore character. She plays one of the more stupid and hollow characters that I have seen. You cannot say that she really has any internal demons. Certainly not to the extent that her husband does. Her job is basically to maintain her family’s appearance. As a housewife she is to raise her husband’s kids, do volunteer work for various organizations, deal with the help, hold dinner parties, et cetera. The entire community and age revolves around women like her. Her husband and the gardener speak in a polite, high-cultured dialect that we suspect does not reveal their true selves. It is simply the language of the day. (This does indeed put another perspective on the issue of race. He talks that way simply because that is the way he knows that he needs to talk, not because it represents his personality. The connection that they think they have may all have been a misunderstanding.) Part of the point is that through integration, and through men redefining their roles in the family, women like this will be displaced. The concept is rather anti-feminist. Women had greater identity and purpose when they were not individualistic. I certainly think that it is FAR FAR FAR too simplistic to say that women were simply oppressed in these roles as homemakers. I do think that it is more appropriate to say that blacks were simply oppressed in these roles as caretakers, even if Far From Heaven makes some arguments towards the contrary.

I really liked this movie. I think that it is quite amazing that it appropriated me to say all of these insane and controversial things. Indeed, I think that it is probably impossible to say anything valid or interesting about the film without getting in a fight with someone. But I think that it mostly stays on the level of a curiosity. I did find it moving in a number of different ways, but it was a feeling that I felt forced to analyze and deconstruct more than simply go with. I have heard it said that this is the best film of 1957, but if it were 1957 and this had just come out, I have to say that I’m not sure that it would really be that good of a film at all. The fact that it is completely artificial and contrived is what makes it so interesting. Haynes has Dennis Haysbert explains his theory on modern art at an art gallery. Modern art is religious art taken back to the basics. It’s difficult not to think that this is Haynes’ rationale for making Far From Heaven and in this manner. He is creating something distant from our perception of reality, and is going to reach us on the most basic level. I think that he is wrong and has misunderstood what is going on in the film. While writing this I have just seen a TV spot for the film. It has blurbs from critics calling it “great fun” and “movie heaven.” I think that it is on those terms that the film is at its worst. This is a very disturbing and very unsatisfying film. It doesn’t touch the soul, and only reaches the heart indirectly. Far From Heaven is very deserving of praise, but this sort of praise is sort of puzzling. My wife said that she thought it was “cute,” but later corrected herself. In a sense, there really is something pleasing but disposable about the film. But, again, its greater power comes in discussion and deconstruction for those sociological insights. And as curiosity, certainly. You come out of it swearing that you won’t be seeing a stranger film all year. Even though Charlie Kaufman has TWO movies coming out soon.