Movie Reviews

Far From Heaven is an absolutely beautiful film. I think it ranks up there as perhaps one of the best-looking films I've ever seen; the cinematography is great, but it's the colours and the look and the feel of it that is so incredible. It's set in 1957, and it's amazing how much it looks like a film that would've been made in that era -- the production design and costumes are amazing, and even the soundtrack is thoroughly 1950s.

Among other things, the movie is about a number of characters who want to change their lives, but the society in which they live is adamantly opposed to the sort of lifestyle change that these characters wish to pursue. The main issues here are homosexuality and interracial relationships. I'm not too familiar with many films from the 1950s, but I've heard that these are two issues that are often present in films of the time, never directly addressed but sort of just below the surface. Far From Heaven brings these taboo-issues right into the spotlight: it's the 1950s movie that could never and would never have been made in the 1950s.

Julianne Moore has the lead role in the film as a woman who befriends her black gardner (Dennis Haysbert, from 24) and becomes ostracized by her peers. Dennis Quaid plays her secretly-gay husband. After he is discovered, he seeks 'treatment' by a pyschologist for his 'mental deficiency' (it is suggested that electro-shock therapy may be able to 'cure' the sickest of patients). The entire cast is really great, as they all pull off the 50s-style mannerisms and language quirks that might have otherwise seemed a little corny. Julianne Moore is the real star, though, as she continually struggles to put on a 1950s happy-housewife face even as her husband and friends begin to abandon her.

This is a strangely sad and happy film. It's really devestating the way that the Julianne Moore character's world begins to collapse around her, as well as the way that the Dennis Haysbert character is treated, as a black man simply trying to make a decent living for himself and his daughter in an otherwise-white neighbourhood.

Yet at the end, after all of this bad stuff has occured, all of the main characters are freed from the lives that had been oppressing them for years, and that's somewhat uplifting.