Far From Heaven
It becomes apparent that in this context, for practical purposes, “Sirk” does not denote a mood or a philosophy or a set of plot elements, but rather a repertoire of technical decisions. With that lexicon of effects, new sentences can be written. –Geoffrey O’Brien, writing on Far From Heaven in the November issue of Artforum
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Significantly, Haynes, who was born in 1961, is splitting with some members of his generation by treating his Sirkian material with sincerity and respect rather than ridicule or cynicism. When he shows the gardener (Dennis Haysbert) suggesting to the heroine at an art gallery that perhaps abstract art is continuing from where religious art left off, we aren’t invited to scoff or snort–as we might be when the widow in All That Heaven Allows is told by the enlightened country folk that her gardener hasn’t read Thoreau’s Walden but “just lives it.” Haynes invites us to share and appreciate the insight. And though his gardener seems almost as much of a paragon and relaxed overachiever as Sidney Poitier’s doctor in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), this gallery sequence registers as simple and truthful–light-years beyond Oscar-bound self-righteousness and star turns.
Sirk’s color-coordinated dresses and living rooms, spacious front lawns and gardens, and exquisitely theatrical interior and exterior lighting schemes are so remarkable, and so impressively duplicated in this movie, that it’s easy for us to lose sight of the fact that real people never lived in them, only movie stars. (That Haynes used New Jersey exteriors to get some of the same results Sirk did in a studio is an important part of his technical achievement.) And some of the character traits found in this world are so singular that the references to Sirk may at times overwhelm their impact as social observation. A neurotic character going ballistic when he can’t summon up an erection inevitably becomes a gloss on Robert Stack’s impotent millionaire in Written on the Wind; a beneficent-looking shrink in a bow tie and vest recalls a key spiritual guru in Magnificent Obsession, the 1954 movie that launched Sirk’s color-weepie cycle. I’d argue that the only part of Sirk’s visual style Haynes doesn’t nail are the lush lap dissolves, the overlapping transitions between scenes that are experienced like warm baths; Haynes’s camera movements accompanying the dissolves are less coordinated than Sirk’s.
The black bar and nightclub operating in the sticks with plenty of clients and a dance band in the middle of the afternoon is simply ridiculous, though part of this conceit could have been borrowed from The Bridges of Madison County. (Haynes is more convincing when he shows us a gay bar in downtown Hartford and when he takes the politically incorrect step of showing us a grotesquely affected gay dandy at the art gallery.) Trivial but worth noting are the somewhat unlikely pairs of double features playing at the movie house where Frank searches for furtive sex, which are clearly targeted at different audiences: The Three Faces of Eve with Miracle in the Rain and Hilda Crane with The Bold and the Brave.
Doubts about the relationship between artifice and truth have followed me through multiple viewings of Far From Heaven, yet each time I’ve seen it I’ve found it more moving, not less. I’ve come to realize that my suspicions about Haynes’s ambiguous relation to the period may have as much to do with my own confusion about this material as with his. I’m prepared to believe that his relationship to the material has at least as much emotional and political authenticity as Sirk’s ever did. And I’m touched not so much by the unlikely proximity of kitsch and truth–a combo that’s equally confounding in Leo McCarey’s An Affair to Remember (1957), in the camera placements, the performances of Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, and the insufferable cliches about artists in garrets juxtaposed with a profound religious sincerity–as by the truth that’s found within the kitsch, at the end of a long train of thought and emotion that began with falsity.
