Well-acted, but ultimately disappointing examination of morals in the 1950s, with a prominent married society couple torn apart by his need to cheat on her (with men) and her friendship with their black gardener. The scenes between Julianne Moore and Dennis Haysbert (as the handsome groundskeeper) are wonderfully captured, moving and lovely--everything the scenes with Dennis Quaid are not. Quaid is not a bad actor, nor is he miscast here, but I do think his role is somewhat contemptible. The husband is shown not only to be a closet-case, but an obnoxious liar and alcoholic--weak and crippling. His relationships with two other men in the film are barely touched upon. Is there some kind of movie-law against showing what is so attractive about two men in lust? True, when the guys kissed, a teenage girl in the row behind me called out, "That's gross!" (making me wonder why some people even venture out of the house), but I do wish we might have gotten to see different sides to the husband; as it is, he's just a closet jerk, and an anchor on this story. **1/2 from ****

I don't know if this film has anything all that useful or original to say. We know, or at the very least we've heard that 1950s folks didn't much care for homosexuals and black people. Todd Haynes is certainly not taking any brave new stands in this film. It's a tribute to Sirk, who would never overtly deal with these exact same subjects. But he did make a good study of racial attitudes in Imitation of Life in 1959, so he was no coward. Fortunately, Far From Heaven does manage to work itself up to something quite worthwhile. The film is subtle in the same way as Sirk's were: throwing florid melodrama in your face while secretly depicting the truth under that cloud. Haynes probably wouldn't have succeeded half as well as he did if he weren't working with Julianne Moore and, to a slightly lesser extent, Dennis Quaid. Moore has been a powerhouse actress for more than a decade now, and this could be her strongest performance yet. I might prefer her in Boogie Nights slightly, but this is close. She's great as a sheltered 1950s housewife coming out of her protective shell. Her husband (Quaid) has been fighting his homosexual lust his whole life, and he's beginning to lose the battle. Rejected, Moore befriends her gardener, an educated black man (Dennis Haysbert). It's not love, at least right away. Moore is just enthused to have found someone outside of her own world who understands her and will talk with her in an honest manner. The color cinematography, set design, and costume design are full of transcendent Sirk-influenced colors. Perhaps my favorite aspect of the film is the musical score, by Elmer Bernstein. It would be a shame to see it go without an Academy Award nomination. 8/10.

FAR FROM HEAVEN is like a long, elaborate joke that seems to build and build to a punchline that never comes. As it goes along, you patiently wait for it to have a point, your interest ebbs and flows, but it is fanciful enough that you stick it out to the end, only to discover that it was not a joke and was never intended be. And you're left confused, embarrassed and more than little bit irritated.

FAR FROM HEAVEN is a detailed recreation of a very specific type of drama from the 1950's: a high-gloss, emotion-on-the-sleeve "women's picture" wherein everything has the rich Technicolor tone of an ad for refrigerators or hair care products from out of the pages of LIFE, LOOK or the Ladies' Home Journal of that era. Yet, this studied look of perfection is undercut with a melodramatic angst of social disorder and class dysfunction. It was high class soap opera and it's chief practitioner was Douglas Sirk, though he had his imitators.

This sort of pastiche of cinematic artificial perfection died even before the beginning of the sixties and took on a dinosaur like quality with the advent of the French New Wave, social unrest and the long overdue death of the production code. Therefore, when director Todd Haynes serves up this painstaking recreation of this antique genre, one has the right to be suspicious; Hollywood usually only visits it's past for the purpose of parody, think MOVIE MOVIE or YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN. The film is so straightfaced in its recreation of the genre -- lush, melodramatic music, heightened emotional line readings, etc. -- that one assumes that Haynes has his tongue firmly in his cheek. But he doesn't; he genuinely wants to explore how this type of 50's film with would have dealt with the issues of interracial romance and homosexuality had the times permitted those themes to be openly explored way back when.

This leads to one simple question: Why? If you take a very real situation and set in down in a very fake setting, it doesn't make the real situation feel even more real; it makes the situation seem fake as well. And therein lies the problem with FAR FROM HEAVEN: instead of being an honest exploration of the themes of bigotry and homophobia, it only seems to trivializes it's own intentions, without even a fig leaf of satire to disguise it's failure.

Julianne Moore is charming in the lead role, but you have to be willing to accept the idea that she is sophisticated enough to understand her husband's closet homosexuality on one hand, yet be so naive that she doesn't realize that running around town and socializing with a black man is a no-no, even in the relatively liberal setting of suburban Connecticut. And her stylized suffering seems as artificial as the picture perfect set design and lush background score.

FAR FROM HEAVEN can be appreciated as a wonderful, if utterly hollow, exercise in style, but as an exploration of social mores of the 1950s -- or of contemporary standards -- it is far from heavenly.