Far From Heaven (12A)

Zen perfection: so very Fifties, so very now

The past, as they say, is another country, and for American cinema, the 1950s have long been a favourite location for get-away-from-it-all holidays. The era offers film-makers the best of both worlds. On one hand, they can relish its chrome-bright fridge-ad superficiality and wax nostalgic for America's lost innocence. On the other, they can indulge in the sense of moral superiority that comes with hindsight, deploring the realities behind the pastel facade – racial segregation, McCarthyism, sexual repression. Such retro fantasies have a way of having their Key lime pie and eating it. The 1998 time-travel lark Pleasantville saw the Fifties as a quaint but brutal faraway land where the natives were just waiting to be improved by modern sophistication – a prime example of the condescension that often informs the retro aesthetic.

Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven also reviews Fifties America and its cinema through the optic of hindsight; however, Haynes' approach is something quite different. Here he pays extended homage to Douglas Sirk, the 1950s master of the Hollywood "women's picture", who once drenched many a hankie with melodramas like Written on the Wind and There's Always Tomorrow. Far From Heaven tells a story that Sirk might easily have told, if his era had allowed: a well-heeled Connecticut housewife discovers her husband is homosexual, while herself falling for her black gardener. Haynes effectively conflates two Sirk films – All That Heaven Allows, about a suburban widow's romance with a younger (white) gardener, and Imitation of Life, a still startlingly confrontational exploration of racial attitudes.

Sirk's gardener, played by Rock Hudson, was a tender bohemian who embodied the nature-worshipping philosophy of Thoreau; his counterpart in Haynes' film (played with tender wit by Dennis Haysbert, currently the first black president in 24) is a cultured, confident sophisticate, who expounds views on religious art and abstraction and tells housewife Cathy (Julianne Moore) the correct way to pronounce Miró. He could never have existed in a Fifties film; nor could Cathy's husband Frank (Dennis Quaid), a bluff executive belatedly and nervously exploring his true sexuality outside office hours.

Haynes says, and shows, things that Sirk could not – at least, not explicitly. And he does so as an heir to those Seventies film-studies academics who argued that Sirk's films were not lurid lowbrow froth but complex texts about the cultural tensions of their time: Far From Heaven takes it as read that Sirk is Hollywood's Flaubert. We also know now that Sirk's paradigm of desirable male heterosexuality, Rock Hudson, was secretly homosexual; thus his films have come to be interpreted as encoded parables of inadmissible passion (a reading that underlies both Fassbinder's and Almodóvar's devoted Sirkism).

It's worth remembering, however, that Sirk's films were anything but naive or unconscious of their own themes: they still strike you as remarkably explicit and self-aware. Haynes is not teasing out meanings of which Sirk was ignorant, but rather making a film that Sirk himself could have made today, and – here's the great thing – making it in Sirk's own screen language. Far From Heaven may, at first sight, seem implausibly lush, but it doesn't use Sirk as a pretext for flippant kitsch. Far from smirking at an archaic style, Haynes makes the style live and signify again in all its richness. He produces a homage in the true sense, subjugating himself entirely to his master's vision, effectively becoming Sirk reborn. It's less the self-conscious drag-act of pastiche, more the directorial equivalent of Method acting, taken to a degree of Zen perfection.

The stylistic mastery is all the more remarkable when you realise how it involves eradicating all the giveaway tics of today: not least from Julianne Moore, who has managed to attune her delivery and facial expressions entirely to the delicate, formal hesitancy of a Sirk heroine such as Jane Wyman. Starting from the opening, euphoric crane shot, the film gives us not an imitation of Sirk, but something like the real thing. There are the extraordinary interiors designed by Mark Friedberg: Cathy's perfect lounge, claustrophobically cluttered with screens and sofas, seems to change colour with the seasons and the moods. There's the casting, in which every face embodies a type: Patricia Clarkson's birdlike, cheerily bigoted neighbour, James Rebhorn's politely rational bow-tied shrink. There are Sandy Powell's expressive costumes, most magnificently the galleon-like frocks that seem to carry Cathy as much as they constrict her. Ed Lachman's photography flawlessly evokes the chameleon floridity of Sirk's Technicolor: faces glow gold with passion, or turn dark blue in the throes of nocturnal anguish. And – luxury of luxuries, and proof that the film is playing it for real, emotionally speaking – there's Elmer Bernstein's sleek, swooning music.

Haynes is not having fun at anyone's or anything's expense: he's neither mocking Fifties cinema, nor Fifties audiences for not really getting Sirk's films, nor his own characters. Cathy is no noble rebel for us to cheer, thereby bolstering our own liberal self-esteem, but neither is she blamed for her lack of knowledge. Instead, she's shown as a product of her age. Haynes shows us Cathy's sometimes ludicrous contradictions – she prissily congratulates herself on supporting racial equality, then gets her black maid to sign a petition on her behalf – but he shows them in a social context that lets us understand them rather than snigger.

Haynes also makes brilliant use of period stereotype. The homosexual world is partly represented in cartoonish traits that a 1950s audience might have recognised: a pouting art critic, a bar full of middle-aged men in berets and cravats. Meanwhile Frank – a very impressive Dennis Quaid, crashing with titanic force against the constraints of his own macho image and body language – is cracking up because he's trying desperately to disguise his real self for the sake of convention, of grey-suited family-man appearance.

Far From Heaven is offered to us as a prettily-ribboned gift box of period pleasures, a lavish indulgence as well as an intellectually serious meta-weepie. A key point about Sirk's style, Haynes reminds us, is that its visual luxury revealed Eisenhower's America itself as a glorified exercise in set dressing, in deceptive mise-en-scène. It's clear that Haynes sees present-day America in much the same way: his bracingly chilly Safe, also starring Moore as a model housewife on the edge of the abyss, was the most challenging of all the Nineties suburban-dystopia films, and you could see Far From Heaven as its thematic sequel. It may be about the past, but it makes you wonder whether 1950s America isn't closer than we think. What's sad is that Fifties Hollywood drama, in all its moral and social complexity, now seems further away, more lost to us, than ever.

j.romney@independent.co.uk