Word: heavens
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...scoring with critics in Far from Heaven, an affecting, stylish homage to director Douglas Sirk, whose soapy melodramas like All That Heaven Allows (1955) are respected by film buffs for their baroque sentimentality and cynical undertones. Directed by Todd Haynes, Far from Heaven stars Julianne Moore as a white 1950s housewife who falls for her black gardener (Dennis Haysbert), scandalizing the suburban populace of Hartford, Conn. Quaid is her overachieving husband, who confesses to her that he's gay. The expertly rendered performance (plus his own comeback story) could get Quaid his first Oscar nomination. "I had success back...
...adapts the 1998 Fuhrman book by the same name. As a true-crime rehash, it's shoddier than usual, especially marred by Moxley's corny narration from beyond the grave. ("No one knew what to think," she says. "There were no murders in heaven.") But as a snapshot of Fuhrman's self-image, it's fascinating. Fuhrman--as interpreted by Fuhrman--is a driven detective, frustrated by the Greenwich cops (he says they're "brain dead," lazy and afraid to offend their rich patrons) and an unforgiving world. We know that he is "the convicted perjurer who helped...
These were the ladies who lunched in Douglas Sirk's 1950s "women's pictures" (magnificent obsession, all that heaven allows, imitation of life). Universal Studios decreed the improbable luxe of their suburban decor and the oversaturated colors of the films' palette. reviewers of the time dismissed these films (though audiences lapped them up), but over the years academics, feminist theorists and the ga-ga cinephile community have insisted on a re-evaluation. They see in Sirk's films' sympathy for his painfully repressed heroines a slyly subversive assault on the bland values that strangled them...
This imputes to the European-born director an intention not entirely supported by his work. But writer-director Todd Haynes, whose far from heaven is both a perfect pastiche of and a passionate homage to Sirk, makes the best possible case for him. Haynes encountered sirk when he was studying film at brown university and soon enough--possibly because haynes is a gay man, all too familiar with bourgeois hostility to sexual nonconformity--became hooked. "Sirk was trying to approach these Ladies Home Journal properties with a kind of critical distance," says Haynes, "critiquing dominant American cultures and a sort...
...unlike Sirk, he has actors who can play a fuller emotional range than the stiffish likes of Lana Turner and Rock Hudson. Quaid makes a decent man's anguish richly palpable. Moore makes us feel hidden frenzy with a cool and ultimately heartbreaking grace. As a result, Far from Heaven ironizes without parodying an antique screen manner, then reaches out from beneath this smooth cover to grab us. It's the Sirk movie--fully alert to all his shadowy implications--that Sirk may or may not have intended but never actually made...