Far from Heaven
Written and directed by Todd Haynes
With Julianne Moore, Dennis Quaid and Dennis Haysbert
Warner Home Video
REVIEW BY LOUIS PROYECT
For anybody growing up in an affluent small town or suburbia during the 1950s, Far from Heaven will create a strong sense of deja vu. Though set in Hartford, Connecticut in 1957, it suggests any municipality that upheld the kind of "traditional values" that so many youth rebelled against a few years later.
When we first encounter Cathy and Frank Whitaker (Julianne Moore and Dennis Quaid) in their spacious home, they seem to be poster children for the Eisenhower-era. In this household, Frank Whitaker wears the pants. After arriving at home in the evening, Cathy is sure to attend to his every need while their two children obey their mother's every word. As 19th century Marxist Friedrich Engels pointed out, within the family the husband is the bourgeois and the wife represents the proletariat. If this is so, the Whitaker children are a subproletariat. In nearly every exchange of dialogue between husband and wife, or parent and child, authority is on display. The Whitaker home is a gilded cage.
Despite Frank Whitaker's square-jawed, hyper-masculine image, we (and his wife) soon discover that he has a sexual preference for other men. The couple go to a psychiatrist in order to cure his "problem". This might involve electroshock and other forms of "aversion" therapy. Quaid's performance as the anguished closeted husband is masterful, as is Moore's as his loyal but despairing wife.
With little understanding of his underlying desires, or any ability to see a road back to "normalcy", the two characters command our pity. Ultimately, the only solution to the kinds of contradictions they faced would come in the form of the gay liberation movement, which once and for all legitimised alternative sexuality. Once this genie was out of the bottle, all attempts to put it back in are doomed to fail.
As Cathy Whitaker finds herself feeling more and more isolated and abandoned, she finds herself drawn to their African-American gardener. Raymond Deagan (Dennis Haysbert), a handsome and well-educated man, is the one character in the film who seems capable of self-awareness. Perhaps it is his immunity from the sham values that pervade white Hartford that attract Cathy Whitaker to him. After agreeing to a drive in Deagan's pick-up truck to get away from the sorrows at home, they drop into a restaurant in the black section of Hartford, where they share a cocktail and a slow dance.
Since Cathy Whitaker is not really able to leave bourgeois society behind her as the beat generation did, she is doomed to suffer. Todd Haynes has crafted a film very much in the tradition of Douglas Sirk, who made a series of "weepers" featuring women in conflict with the phony values of bourgeois society. In his 1959 Imitation of Life, Sirk explores the same sort of themes.
Despite his affinity for material that bordered on soap opera, Sirk was active in the German theatre of the Weimar Republic and frequently staged the works of left-wing playwright Bertold Brecht. He fled Germany with his Jewish wife after the rise of Hitler.
Along with the late Rainer Fassbinder who consciously emulated Sirk in films such as Martha (the heroine lives on "Douglas Sirk Street"), Todd Haynes has chosen to make a film in the Sirkian mode.
In a November 10, 2002 New York Times article by J. Hoberman, we discover that "Mr. Haynes, a graduate of Brown University with a degree in art and semiotics, first encountered Sirk in college in the 1980s at a moment when academic interest in his movies was stimulated by a feminist reappraisal and radical rereading of so-called women's pictures". Although this could have led to a dry, academic approach to the material in Far from Heaven, his overall skill as a director and story-teller yields not only one of the finest US films of last year but one that repudiates all the attempts by the conservative US to turn back the clock to a desperate and unhappy past.
[Louis Pryect is moderator of the Marxism List. Visit <http://www.marxmail.org>.]
From Green Left Weekly, February 25, 2004.
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