Art deco: `Far from Heaven' & `Frida'

Commonweal, Jan 17, 2003 by Rand Richards Cooper

A pair of films offers variations on the theme of passion and its impediments and privileges.

Far from Heaven, Todd Haynes's sumptuous homage to Hollywood melodramas of yore, is set in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1957. In the Insurance Capital of America during the thick of the Eisenhower era, conformity is pursued with fanatical zeal, behavior monitored and controlled by an extensive network of gossip. Any deviation from the society-page party line means retribution in the form of slights, cuts, and tribal shunning. The wives occupy themselves plotting vast strategic parties and chatting with their maids; the men play golf and do business and in general exhibit the emotional range of jellyfish. Amid this narrowness, Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore) seems passively content; she has the glow of someone who takes unexamined happiness as a birthright. But when her business executive husband Frank (Dennis Quaid) falls into a midlife crisis involving, of all things, a persistent homoerotic desire, it all unravels. Up to now, Cathy has been safe within her upper-middle-class WASP worldview. From here on in, you might say, it's life beyond the pale.

Far from Heaven hurls the irresistible force of illicit desire against the immovable object of social convention, sparking fear and shame. "I'm going to beat this thing," Quaid grimly mutters, as if homosexuality were cancer. And writer/director Haynes is not content with sending just one of the Whitakers up against a big taboo. Reeling from her discovery, Cathy finds solace in the company of her gardener, Raymond (Dennis Haysbert), who in addition to being charming, sensitive, handsome, and eloquent about modern art, also happens to be black. In 1957 Hartford, there's only one thing worse than men desiring men, and that's whites desiring blacks. And so off they go, Frank and Cathy, on twin plunges into the void.

Moore's and Quaid's performances are quite moving, and could easily be the stuff of realist drama. But Haynes surrounds them with stylizations so extravagant, you gape your way through the movie. The women's dresses, for instance--perfectly color coordinated not merely with one another, but with the foliage! The Whitaker living room, upholstered in rust-orange and aqua; Frank's late-modernist office at Magnatech; the family's sky-blue, fin-tailed station wagon: every shot is a page torn from Look magazine. Even the opening credits are a lavish period-piece genuflection, splashed across the screen in giant blue letters as Elmer Bernstein's score throbs with orchestral emotion (Bernstein, who wrote the score for To Kill A Mockingbird, has been making magnificent film music for over fifty years). The Whitaker children sound straight out of Leave It to Beaver ("Gee, Pop, think you could come to my game on Saturday?"), and the arrival points of the plot have the blatantness of parody. When rumor circulates that Cathy has been seen having lunch with a Negro, ostracism is instant and total: after her daughter's ballet performance, the other mothers clutch their girls and stare at Cathy in horror, as if she has leprosy.

Far from Heaven takes its inspiration from those big 1950s melodramas made by such directors as Douglas Sirk, whose All That Heaven Allows is echoed in the title--swoony tearjerkers that were treated harshly by critics of the time. But is this a send-up of these films, or a loving act of praise? I'm hard put to recall a movie in recent decades at once so campy-seeming and yet so earnest. The way Haynes reproduces the old films' look and feel, while injecting contemporary content, is almost bizarre. (Imagine someone writing a Dickensian novel, in nineteenth-century prose, about a latchkey kid on Ritalin.) It's fascinating to watch him work this jarring anachronism to his advantage, lulling us, through the look and sound of his movie, into filmic conventions of a half century ago, only to bring us rocketing back with moments of brutal frankness and anger no screenwriter could have gotten away with in 1957.

Ultimately, the formula is a way for Haynes to have it all: Far from Heaven is at once swooning visual tribute, parody, and earnest tearjerker. It's a complicated game, reproducing an entire set of conventions this faithfully. And because the film conventions mirror the social ones, the end effect, oddly, is nostalgia for an oppressive era: the magnificent sadness of propriety relentlessly thwarting all dreams, making heaven a ghostly intimation of happiness, and exile a perpetual longing.

While Far from Heaven puts social damnation in the way of desire, Frida, a biopic chronicling the Mexican surrealist painter Frida Kahlo and her stormy on-again, off-again marriage to Diego Rivera, explores the opposite, passion without conventional limitations of any kind. Kahlo's life was the stuff of legend--wife of Rivera but also lover of Trotsky, and of Josephine Baker in Paris. A horrific streetcar accident in her youth bequeathed Kahlo a lifetime of suffering; and many of her paintings explicitly took on the subject of her own pain, both physical and psychic.