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FAR
FROM HEAVEN
9/10
USA
2002 : Todd Haynes : 107mins
Of
all the movies nominated for this year’s 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 (24’s 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 Sirk’s 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 Sirk’s stylised, artifical world. In lesser hands, this
could easily have resulted in a movie-bore’s 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 we’re
willingly swept along by this feat of unashamedly intelligent, unashamedly
emotional movie-making.
22nd
February, 2003
(seen 24th January, Warner Village, Ellesmere Port)
by Neil
Young
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