Neil Young's Film Lounge

Neil Young’s Film Lounge – Far From Heaven

FAR FROM HEAVEN

9/10

USA 2002 : Todd Haynes : 107mins

Of all the movies nominated for this years Oscars, none is more worthy of awards than this superbly crafted drama easily one of the best films of the year. Knowing the Academy, however, it’ll be all too depressingly predictable if Haynes loses out to Nia Vardalos My Big Fat Greek Wedding for Best Original Screenplay, and his star Julianne Moore is pipped at the post and loses by a (plasticine) nose to Nicole Kidman, her co-star in The Hours.

As in that (inferior) movie, Moore is typically superb as a troubled housewife in affluent 1950s small-town America – Cathy Whitaker, whose marriage to TV sales executive Frank (Dennis Quaid, never better) comes under strain as he starts giving way to long-repressed gay impulses. Cathy seeks solace with her gardener Raymond (24s Dennis Haysbert), but when their friendship gradually develops into romance her friends react with horror: not only is Raymond seen as a manual labourer, he also happens to be black

Far From Heaven is a loose remake of Douglas Sirks 1955 Jane Wyman / Rock Hudson tearjerker All That Heaven Allows, and every element of the production (including the Oscar-nominated cinematography and score) brilliantly recreates the look and feel of Sirks stylised, artifical world. In lesser hands, this could easily have resulted in a movie-bores sterile exercise in ironic, kitschy camp but Haynes somehow delivers a thoroughly absorbing and entertaining but absolutely dead-serious analysis of issues that remain all too pressing five decades on. This is barely a period movie at all: we very quickly forget all about the Sirk-recreation business as were willingly swept along by this feat of unashamedly intelligent, unashamedly emotional movie-making.

22^nd February, 2003
(seen 24^th January, Warner Village, Ellesmere Port)

by Neil Young

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