Magnificent Obsession
Can a Douglas Sirk-style melodrama of repression work in these times of do-it-all excess? Todd Haynes' Far from Heaven proves it can, says Richard Falcon. Plus Nick James talks to the director.
"I have seen six films by Douglas Sirk. Among them were the most beautiful in the world." This remark concludes an astute 1971 personal appreciation by Rainer Werner Fassbinder of, among others, Sirk's All That Heaven Allows (1955), Written on the Wind (1956) and Imitation of Life (1959). Sirk's 1950s Hollywood melodramas were the spur to a decade of ferocious creativity on Fassbinder's part, leading up to his untimely death in 1982. It was in the early 1970s also that Sirk's films were unearthed by feminist film theory. The hitherto despised form of the 'weepie' or 'women's picture' offered an object of study to which women's experience was central.
Now, nearly half a century after the first appearance of All That Heaven Allows, and decades after Sirk's rediscovery, comes Todd Haynes' Far from Heaven, a remarkable tribute to Sirk's cinema. Its success in the US has shifted Haynes' career up a gear, from indie festival favourite to mainstream acclaim. So the 'Sirk effect' strikes again. But what does Sirk's world of stifling social restriction mean to us now in the anything-goes era, where excess is a cinematic staple?
Far from Heaven's wholesale appropriation of Sirkian narrative, colour palette, mise en scène and acting styles and its mostly unironic take on 1950s America make it a unique homage. Although retro styling is nothing new, Todd Haynes' concern for the lush seductiveness of Sirk's cinema makes his film a ravishing experience. As soon as it opens, we're swept away by a russet riot of autumnal trees and Elmer Bernstein's gorgeous music, already tinged with bitter-sweet regret. It's autumn 1957 in Hartford, Connecticut. A gleaming sky-blue-and-white station wagon crosses the neat town square and draws up in front of the tidy upper-middle-class suburban home of our heroine Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore). This may prove to be far from heaven, but it's also a world away from David Lynch-style small-town America or the moribund provinces beloved of Indiewood. This is instead an idea made substance - a place of apple-pie order recreated for a millennial world in fear of chaos. It's not set up for mockery or easy gibes; this Hartford looks as beautiful - but from our perspective also as transient - as the falling leaves, as much in danger of being swept away by the social change of the 1960s as a chiffon scarf caught by the wind. It is also a fluid, somewhat flashier version of the opening of All That Heaven Allows.
Moore's Cathy Whitaker is a poised, attractive housewife married to Frank (Dennis Quaid), a handsome, immaculately groomed but dissolute at the edges executive working for (a cool Sirkian touch) the Magnatech television manufacturing corporation. The couple are, as Cathy's friend Eleanor (Patricia Clarkson) calls them, "Mr and Mrs Magnatech", and Cathy is a pillar of the community, her home and lifestyle the subject of fashion and society spreads. Post-modern games of the Pleasantville (1998) or Back to the Future (1985) variety are not on this agenda. The setting and Cathy's central position within this conformist community are treated with the same kind of respect one finds in Sirk, reminding us of Fassbinder's description of Sirk's cinema as "the films of someone who loves people, not despises them as we do".
The world of melodrama is, of course, one in which unruly desires erupt first in the domestic, then in the wider social order, and Far from Heaven's plot offers us parallel disruptions involving both sexuality and race. One evening when Cathy decides to turn up unannounced at the deserted Magnatech building with Frank's dinner, she sees her executive husband in his office making out with a man. Haynes builds up the dread of anticipation as she leaves her home and crosses town, clutching a Tupperware box which matches her dress, and then trespasses into that cherrywood inner sanctum to discover her organisation man with his pants down. It is especially effective because Haynes is at pains to solicit our curiosity about and empathy for Frank. Haynes has cited another melodrama as an influence here: Max Ophuls' The Reckless Moment (1949, itself recently reconceived as The Deep End, 2001), in which housewife Joan Bennett is forced to enter a criminal demimonde to save her teenage daughter from blackmailers. In search of fulfilment, Frank crosses social barriers, enters submerged liminal worlds. Earlier we have observed him as he leaves a bar and follows a man down an alley to wind up at a furtive, subterranean 1950s gay bar - a pre-Stonewall underworld, hiding from the light.
Cathy's reckless moment, in turn, beckons in the form of widower and single parent Raymond Deagan, the son of her old gardener, who owns a small garden centre on the edge of town and has inherited the task of tending to her plants and shrubs. The character of Frank partly represents Haynes being frank about the fact that we can't nowadays watch All That Heaven Allows or Written on the Wind without another subtext - closeted desire - being added through our relatively new knowledge of the sexuality of the films' star, Rock Hudson. Raymond, who is black, is a modulation into a racial key of Hudson's 'close to nature' gardener Ron Kirby in All That Heaven Allows, with whom Jane Wyman's well-off middle-aged widow Cary Scott falls in love. Where Hudson's Ron is that 1950s archetype the 'nature boy' - he wears a red checked lumberjack jacket and lives in an old mill in the woods with his unread Thoreau (he doesn't need to read it, we are told, because he lives it) - Haynes' movie does not see Raymond in these terms. Dennis Haysbert makes Raymond calm, cultured, considerate and educated, the sort of dignified character a young Sidney Poitier might have played in the 1950s. He is Cathy's object of desire, her prop and her confidant as the stresses of confronting Frank's 'problem' start to take their toll on her.
Raymond's natural habitat is not the wilderness but the art gallery. In a key scene at a modern art exhibition, Cathy moves from a camp metropolitan art dealer and the local gossip columnist to talk to Raymond. "I'm not prejudiced. My husband and I have always believed in equal rights for the negro and support the NAACP," is her early gambit. ("I'm glad to hear that," is his gently teasing reply.) The talk turns to modern art; he explains how to pronounce Miró and extols the quest for divinity behind the pared-down abstractions of modern art. As in many of Sirk's studio movies, the dialogue here is almost embarrassing in its trite pretensions (think of Jane Wyman's children telling her that Freud thinks sex after a certain age is vulgar in All That Heaven Allows). But as with Sirk the point is being made by the sidelong glances aimed at the couple. In the first of two scenes strongly reminiscent of Fassbinder's minimalist theatrical mise en scène in his own reworkings of Sirk, a sudden rapid pan away from Cathy and Raymond reveals that they are being fixed by the disapproving gazes of her friends and neighbours.
The second of these scenes parallels Frank's furtive visit to the secret gay bar when, in response to Cathy wondering out loud what it would be like to be "the only one in the room" (i.e. who is black), Raymond takes her to a roadhouse with exclusively black customers. There they dance under a glitterball, attracting more disapproving gazes. It's an echo of the opening of Fassbinder's All That Heaven Allows tribute Fear Eats the Soul (1974), in which his mismatched lovers Ali and Emmi dance in a dingy bar, under similar scrutiny. Except that Fassbinder, with a politicised, anarchic radicalism of a kind wholly alien to contemporary North American film-making, turned Sirk's well-off widow platonically attracted to a hunky gardener into a downtrodden sixtysomething charwoman embarking on a sexual relationship with a Moroccan Gastarbeiter thirty years her junior.
The critical case for Sirk as a (quaint notion now, I admit) 'progressive auteur' in the midst of the 1950s studio system was based on his films' concern for the cruel paradoxes of women's social experience and the eloquence of their stylised visuals. Both these notions haunt the edges of Haynes' bewitching recreation. Sirk's heroines are first and foremost trapped by social pressures; the trick performed by his leading ladies, such as Jane Wyman in All That Heaven Allows, was to make us aware of their characters' concealed romantic and sexual needs through nuances of performance. The function of the visual stylisation was twofold: a cathartic burst of cinematic rapture for the audience as counterpoint to the joy denied the heroine and a way of furnishing the audience with privileged information denied the characters.
The problem for Far from Heaven is that Hollywood cinema since the 1980s has predisposed audiences to expect kick-ass heroines rather than women as victims of a status quo. So Cathy has to be someone who also pre-empts the dramatic social change of the 1960s. This makes her a figure who in many ways seems more resilient throughout than, for example, her nosey best friend Eleanor, with her bigoted euphemisms about "flowery men who are too light on their feet". Cathy is unabashed by her trip to the black roadhouse - this is a woman who reads Cosmopolitan while sunbathing, after all.
Similarly in Far from Heaven the social pressures around race are spelt out in the screenplay, rather than solely being allowed to emerge through director of photography Edward Lachman's brilliant recreation of Sirk's rich studio style. In a nod towards Imitation of Life, Sirk's most upfront film about race, Cathy is shown instructing her black maid, who is helping her on with her coat, to sign an NAACP petition on her behalf as she is too busy. Haynes seems sure enough of Julianne Moore's brilliance in recreating the nuances of performance Sirk coaxed out of his own leading ladies to allow our identification with her to falter at key points such as this. Fassbinder's observation that "women think in Sirk's films" is important to an understanding of Moore's achievement in reproducing the Sirkian heroine for a new age: no modern American actress thinks better on screen.
If this clear strength of character prevents us from feeling too large a lump in the throat as Cathy has to let Raymond take the train out of her life, their relationship unconsummated, then this too could be true to Sirk. His films enraptured, amazed and repaid devoted analysis, but were sometimes considered too clever and distanced to work as unabashed weepies (although my wife, viewing All That Heaven Allows for the first time recently, provided me with firsthand evidence of the movie's undiminished tear-jerking prowess). More problematic is the absence of a killer Sirkian high-style climax such as the moment in All That Heaven Allows when Jane Wyman catches her reflection in the TV set bought by her callous children as a consolation for giving up the love of her life.
This sort of full Sirkian stylisation is on display, however, in the early scenes focused on Frank. Haynes respects Sirk's reluctance to use close-ups for easy empathy with his characters, preferring montage and music to cue emotional engagement. Long shots transform the Whitakers' living room into a prison, confining Frank within the set design, plunging him into the shadows - which is where he will be forced to live his life if he doesn't "lick this problem". Alongside the 1950s social repressions dictating that homosexuality be seen as a curable pathology, Haynes here allows a degree of contemporary cinematic frankness to breach the retro mood in a way he doesn't with the Cathy-Raymond plot. The one 'fuck' allowed in the dialogue by the US PG-13 rating (even brilliant homages have their pragmatic side) carries an unusual power in this context, as does the sight of Frank kissing a man in his office.
But these moments do not obscure the most remarkable thing Haynes has done for Dennis Quaid in casting him as Frank. Quaid may invoke stylistic echoes of tortured, impotent Robert Stack in Written on the Wind, but his performance ultimately represents something even more extraordinary: the first time a man has played, with not a hint of campness, a full-on 1950s Sirkian heroine.