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FAR FROM HEAVEN
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Once upon a time, Hollywood invented the Smug movie, which has two latent premises:
A Smug movie is always set somewhere that we the moviegoing public do not live – the past, another country, or Wasteland Suburbia (itself a Hollywood invention). As it opens, we see a life that everyone in it accepts as normal (but of course we see it as parochial and stultifying) until our Protagonist has the Moment of Dissonance – the sudden quiet insight that cracks the world's façade and sets the protagonist on a painfully earnest journey of self-discovery that, when completed, forms the movie's appropriate Smug Coda, allowing both filmmaker and moviegoer to depart feeling complacent. Ordinary People (1980) was, I think, the Ur-movie of the form, American Beauty (1999) its most recent example(*).
Though disgraceful, this formula is cynically pragmatic, especially because it works upon that most impressionable buffalo herd, the casual movie critic, for it appeals to said critic's baser instincts – superiority and self-imagined cultural tolerance. In such way Smug Superiority movies gain plaudits, Oscar nominations (especially if the Protagonist is played by a star so that we can admiringly cluck, "What a fine performance!"), and box office.
Far From Heaven opens in a suburbia scarcely less gauzily-backlit than Pleasantville. It isn't really 1957 – no Sputnik, no Cold War, no beatniks, none of the era's grainy texture – but is retro-real (office and home furnishings by Life magazine out of Ozzie and Harriett via Hazel) in a Technicolor eye-candy hoot. Perfect children David and Janice call their parents Mother and Father. Girdled by big-hipped long skirts, Kathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore) twirls through woody-station-wagon faux-Hartford (all the geography is wrong) being profiled in the society pages and kind to her Negro maid Sybil and her Negro gardener Raymond Deagen (Dennis Haysbert), unthreatened, unruffled, her world serene … until she discovers, in the most shocking way, that faithful husband Frank (Dennis Quaid) is a latent homosexual.
Grossly overdirected (the rococo background music swells threatening before Frank hits Kathy), the movie is ponderously didactic, visually static, and pervasively clichéd. Quaid plays angry repressed glaring Frank as if passing a gallstone the entire time, and Haysbert's Raymond is so beatific he should have been fitted for a halo. It's discouraging to see good actors reduced to such two-dimensionality.
Despite Quaid's billing and grimaces (and a delightful supporting turn by trouper Patricia Clarkson, hysterical in High Art as a Hannah Schygulla wannabe), this is entirely Julianne Moore's movie, and it is a credit to her seraphic face and delicate talent that she almost makes it worth following. But there's no humor, virtually no complexity (homosexual visual clichés straight out of Death In Venice), precious little plot, and scarcely a riffle of enlightenment or resolution.
The more I think about Far From Heaven, the more I like Pleasantville, a far superior film that did something with its story and let its characters from both milieus (Joan Allen, Tobey Maguire, and Reese Witherspoon) learn something from their temporal cross-fertilization rather than standing smugly outside it.
(*) I haven't seen About Schmidt, but I fear the worst.