Far From Heaven

The 1950s were a transitional time in American society. The economic boom following World War II put a chicken in every pot, while the baby boom guaranteed there would be plenty of mouths to feed it to. Men wore hats. Women wore gloves. Children were seen but not heard. So were blacks. Homosexuals were neither. Conformity ruled, but there were rumblings of a seismic shift to come. Like a tour guide from Hell, Elvis Presley arrived at mid-decade to point the way to a less inhibited way of life. In Alabama, a black seamstress named Rosa Parks refused to surrender her bus seat to a white person. The boycott of the transit system that followed was led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who argued that though there was a chicken in every pot, too many blacks didn’t have a pot to put the chicken in.

Few films captured the tension in these repressed times better than those of director Douglas Sirk. Dismissed at the time as “soap operas” or “women’s pictures,” glossy melodramas like All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind are now championed by the likes of Martin Scorsese for providing an emotional barometer of the period. Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven is both an homage to Sirk’s canon, and an update that takes advantage of our more permissive climate to see his work in a new perspective.

Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore) is a Connecticut housewife and mother married to straight-laced Frank (Dennis Quaid). But those laces are coming untied when he can no longer suppress his homosexual feelings. As he enters into an affair with another man, Cathy finds herself unable to resist the friendly attentions of her black gardener (Dennis Haysbert).

These issues are discussed as they likely would have been at the time, reluctantly, with shock and disapproval. Haynes doesn’t cheat by filtering them through a modern perspective. He avoids sneaking in our more enlightened attitudes on homosexuality and interracial romance. To Frank, his homosexual urges are a sickness, an aberration that he intends to overcome with the help of psychiatry.

The filmmakers are aware that the provocative subject matter dealt with here was hinted at in Sirk’s films with less controversial “problems” like nymphomania and alcoholism substituting for the more taboo issue of homosexuality. In retrospect, the casting of Rock Hudson as the male lead in many of these films suggests the director clearly intended that this daring subtext be present in his work. Hudson’s closet door was opened to the public shortly before his 1985 death from AIDS related complications, but the matinee idol’s homosexuality was an “open secret” in Hollywood from the moment he achieved stardom. The more attentive viewers of Hudson’s early films can often swear they see clues to his orientation sprinkled throughout.

Far From Heaven recreates and pays homage to Sirk’s legacy with breathtaking results. The cinematography and art direction are a marvel. The autumn leaves that were never as colorful in nature as they were when photographed in the now defunct Technicolor process, could have been imported from the set of All That Heaven Allows, the Sirk film to which Haynes’ film owes its strongest debt. The film’s look is almost surreal, appropriate, since, for blacks, and particularly homosexuals, the quiet life of the 1950s must have been as twisted as a painting by Salvador Dali. Except for rock and roll, it is often considered an unremittingly dull era, so tightly buttoned-down that it cut off the circulation. For the more conspiracy minded, it was the real life equivalent of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the 1956 science-fiction classic in which space aliens use sea-pods to overtake the earth, replacing the human population with non-thinking, unfeeling automations. It was the calm before the societal storm that was the 1960s, but in Far From Heaven, Todd Haynes, like Douglas Sirk before him, is aware that life was calm only because so much was hidden, including the yearnings for equality that led to both the civil rights movement and gay liberation.

© 2002 Brian W. Fairbanks


BUY HERE

Frequency: Feel-good science fiction

Though many concepts in science-fiction are ones we wouldn’t want to see played out in reality (would you really want to be cloned, or to live on another planet?), time travel has a wide and irresistible appeal. Rod Taylor’s adventures in The Time Machine linger on in the memories of those weaned on the late, late show, and Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which is, after all, an odyssey through one man’s past, present, and future, comes back to haunt us every Christmas Eve. Even the crew of the Starship Enterprise reached their widest audience (one that included more than Trekkers) with Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home in which Captain Kirk and company returned from the future to visit present day San Francisco. The opportunity to once again see long dead loved ones, relive past pleasures, and rectify mistakes satisfies almost every yearning we have.

Yearning is at the heart of Frequency, directed by Gregory Hobbit from a screenplay by Toby Emmerich. It avoids the cliches of most time travel stories (there are no amusing scenes of the hero grappling with modern morals or technology), and goes most of them one better by having a believable and quite moving family relationship at its center.

The film opens in October 1969, a period quickly established with references to some of the year’s keystone events: the Mets are in the World Series (and would win in an amazing come from behind victory), and, when Frank Sullivan (Dennis Quaid) dances in his kitchen with his wife, Julia (Elizabeth Mitchell), it’s to the accompaniment of Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds,” the recording that put the King back on his throne at the top of the pop charts. Frank dotes on his son, John, singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” to him every night before bedtime, and he unwinds from the pressures of his job as a firefighter by endlessly puffing Camels, following his beloved Mets, and communicating with strangers on the other side of the airwaves on his pre-Internet ham radio.

Thirty years into the future, his son John is a 36 year-old cop, estranged from his girlfriend, immersed in the pursuit of a serial killer, and generally dissatisfied with life. Now living in his childhood home, he begins tinkering with his late father’s ham radio, and while discussing the Mets one night with a stranger on the airwaves, he tunes into the past. The baseball fan with whom he is speaking is not a stranger at all, but his father, alive and kicking in the year 1969. It is the day before his death in a warehouse fire.

Needless to say, the son warns his father of his impending doom, and the tragedy is avoided. But one does not change the past without impacting the future, and though Frank’s life has now been lengthened by twenty years (lung cancer from his cigarette habit is now set to claim him in 1989), disaster looms for others, including Julia, in the form of the Nightingale Killer, a psycho who has been murdering young women.

At this point, Frequency turns into a thriller, and a rather predictable one at that (spotting the killer is a piece of cake), but the thrills are well-handled by director Hobbit, and you’ll likely tighten the grip on the arm of your chair as father and son go head to head with the killer. More importantly, the tenderness of the father-son relationship is never overwhelmed by the plot’s many twists and turns, or by the action that almost dominates the film midway through. It is the tenderness that gives Frequency a special glow that is maintains from the first reel through the amusingly memorable and touching climax.

There are nice special-effects, but they are limited. It is the humans who take center stage. Dennis Quaid is excellent as usual, bringing an “average guy” vividly to life without resorting to condescension or sentimentality. Caviezel is equally good, and though Elizabeth Mitchell’s Julia has comparatively little screen time, she uses it well, conveying the strength of a woman who deeply loves her family, and whose love is abundantly returned. Andre Braugher, the fiery cop of TV’s “Homicide,” is less fiery here, but he provides a solidity that helps keep this imaginative yarn grounded in reality.

Frequency is a “feel good movie,” but one mercifully lacking the innocuousness that such a description often implies. Like time travel itself, Frequency casts a spell that is hard to resist.

Brian W. Fairbanks

Originally published at Paris Woman Journal
© 2001 Brian W. Fairbanks


BUY HERE