"Aw, shucks!" is the first line in Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven that got a laugh at the screening in Berlin on Sunday night. I say "the" screening because there hadn't been one before and there won't be another in Germany until the film officially opens over here in March. According to one of the organizers of the festival that made the screening possible, Concorde, the distributor, is holding it until after the Oscars, cocksure that Far From Heaven is going to pick up a few. Let's hope so.
There were a few snickers before "Aw, shucks!" The 50s-era "painted" font of the opening title, for starters, and then the camera gliding over the idyllic American suburb into which Frank and Cathy Whitaker's big white house is nestled just so. That's when Cathy, played with a subtle and ultimately winning sympathy with her character by Julianne Moore, is asked by her son if he can spend the night with a friend. No, she and his father are going out, so he'll have to keep an eye on his sister. "Aw, shucks!" And the first big laugh.
It was no surprise to me that the Berliners snickered at the idealized American dream Haynes has obviously gone to such painstaking extremes to realize. The crew had scrubbed those houses down cleaner than clean, whiter than white, and washed and waxed every curved line of the automobiles. "You can learn a lot about people in any class, country, and period by studying their most overblown fantasies," writes Jonathan Rosenbaum in his appreciation of Far From Heaven. But the Germans probably know nearly as much about America in the 50s as Americans do. That was the era, after all, in which most of them tried to become Americans themselves. They even know -- and here was the big surprise for me -- the comic potential of American slang no longer in use.
Germans' willful and radical break -- you could even call it a vigorously pursued divorce -- from their own identity during the Wirtschaftswunder, the postwar "economic miracle," is captured best on film, not surprisingly, by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and most explicitly in his first real international breakthrough, The Marriage of Maria Braun. From the grays and browns of the end of the war comes a burst of reds and swimming pool blues as Maria embraces the new way of life brought by the Americanization of West Germany -- and embraces as well the cynical materialism that eventually does her in.
It's only natural that Fassbinder would come to mind while watching Far From Heaven in Germany, since the film is a remake of sorts of Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows. Fassbinder, whose own career whiplashed towards melodrama when he saw his first Sirks, filmed his own remake, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. But how different those remakes are. Just as its characters are stripped of any economic luxuries, Ali is stripped of Sirk's lush imagery down to the barest bones of its story. Far From Heaven, though, dazzles and seduces the eye with its meticulously composed tableaus in which all the pristine costumes and immaculate sets are perfectly, eerily color-coordinated.
"You can come to something far more surprisingly real by acknowledging how much of a construct it is first," Haynes told Geoffrey O'Brien (and you can read that conversation and O'Brien's very fine comments on it in the November Artforum or, if you register -- it's free -- here). Hayne's comment may sound rather Brechtian at first, but his intentions are just the opposite. The construct of Far From Heaven is not aimed to clear the clouds of emotion so that you first think about what you're seeing -- as he told Ellen Willis in the LA Weekly, Haynes very much wants you to cry.
And indeed, the snickers in Berlin soon enough gave way to sniffles. Quite a feat that Haynes has pulled off here: Few clichéd characters are the brunt of so much parody as the 50s-era housewife. How telling it is that John Waters has named Far From Heaven his favorite film of the year in that, while he started out poking vicious fun at the same milieu, by Hairspray and, to an extent, Serial Mom, he'd developed a more pronounced strain of sympathy for his victims.
Following that trajectory, Far From Heaven is light years ahead of him. Another remark Haynes made to O'Brien:
When most people see films set in the 50s today, there's an immediate sense of superiority. It's all about the myth that as time moves on, we become more progressive. Oh wow, they didn't know what sex was until we started to give it to them from our contemporary perspective. So the 50s become a sort of earmark point of oppressive politics and climate, which is very flattering to us as we look back.
We flatter ourselves too soon, too easily, Haynes argues with Far From Heaven, and very convincingly, too. We know that Frank -- and this is certainly the best performance from Dennis Quaid I've ever seen, anyway -- is wrong to think of his own homosexuality as "despicable," but we also know there is no possible way he could think otherwise -- because we have learned the strict and arcane codes of behavior of this world that seems both alien and terribly familiar, just as we learn the contours and constrictions of other codes in, say, Raise the Red Lantern or The Age of Innocence. The discomforting effect of Far From Heaven is its emotionally charged embrace of both the comedy and tragedy of a set of characters trapped in a set of rules we're confident, maybe too confident that we've rewritten.
Take another moment well into the story. Cathy is known in the Hartford, Connecticut of 1957 as something of a liberal crusader, always doing her part for, as one character calls it, "the Negro cause." And when a pair of NAACP reps appear on her doorstep, she doesn't slam the door in their faces as others in the neighborhood no doubt have. They ask her to sign a petition of support when, lo, yet another twist of fate distracts her. So what does she do? Asks Sybil, her maid -- black, of course -- to sign for her.
Cathy means well but has no notion whatsoever of the cruel irony of at least a few of the things she does. There's too much of a sense in her that the social order is the natural order; she's too steeped in it to know the difference. But against all odds, we're pulling for her, big time. "I'm touched not so much by the unlikely proximity of kitsch and truth," writes Rosenbaum, "as by the truth that's found within the kitsch, at the end of a long train of thought and emotion that began with falsity."
In a recent complaint that ran in the Guardian, David Thomson writes, "in Hollywood picture-making now, no one does, or gets, or wants to think about politics." Two items accent in his mind the gap between the politically engaged films of the "supposedly repressed" 50s -- he names George Stevens's A Place in the Sun, Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause, Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly, Richard Brooks's Blackboard Jungle, Elia Kazan'sA Face in the Crowd and Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder -- and the far more politically barren movies on offer now. The first is Sam Fuller's autobiography, A Third Face.
The second is a scene from Far From Heaven. Cathy has a thing for her black gardener, Raymond Deagan, played with quiet confidence by Dennis Haysbert. The feeling is mutual. During an intimate discussion on the street, Cathy is about to go when Raymond places a hand on her arm to stop her. Out of nowhere, there's a burst of, "Boy! Don't you do that!" In such an otherwise quiet movie, it's quite a jolt. "It's uncanny how shocking and nauseating the moment is," writes Thomson, "and how immediately it directs a viewer to the very issues of race still unsettled in America over 40 years later."
Striking as the scene is, though, the real power of Far From Heaven lies in its challenge to make more subtle comparisons and contrasts between the 50s, that long decade between the end of WWII and the assassination of JFK in which the 20th truly did become "the American century," and our current age in which the Bush administration is determined to maintain and even expand upon American military and economic superiority throughout the world. How interesting it is that the White House is currently haunted by so many remnants of the Ford administration, itself merely the tail end of the Nixon years during which one primary project, it could be argued, was to erase the 60s. Or in other words, to go back to the way things were in a supposedly simpler time, the 50s. It was an urge about half of America sought to satisfy again in the 80s when they put Ronald Reagan in the White House.
But as the American culture wars of the late 20th century persist into our own, Haynes reminds us that while that simpler time was peaceful and prosperous, it was also exceedingly suffocating. In these less peaceful, less prosperous times, are there codes that limit our options? Think of all the things one just didn't say during the days and weeks after 9/11. An even more challenging question would be whether or not we're any more able to perceive alternatives to the current social order than Cathy can in the construct of Haynes's 1957.
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