One of my five favorite previews for 2015 has been for the movie Carol which is, more or less, Cate Blanchett narrating a quick story about her life in 1952 New York City. We don’t learn much about it other than she’s married to Kyle Chandler and that not everything is what it seems to be. At the start and then again at the end of the trailer, Blanchett mentions how everything comes full circle. The trailer is captivating and made me want to see it. It’s directed by Todd Haynes, who has filmed just one movie (I’m Not There) between 2015’s Carol and 2002’s Far From Heaven. In Carol, Haynes returned to what worked in Far From Heaven. We return to 1950s Northeast America. In both movies, Haynes craftily tells the stories of lives that are less perfect than they appear.

I watched this movie on a whim sometime between maybe 2008-2012. I remember being incredibly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. It was one of those movies that I didn’t know anything about going in (which I often like), but one in which I most certainly was not won over by the first 10 minutes (which I never like). But I continued to give the movie a chance and was rewarded for it. The movie is set in mid-1950’s Connecticut, and, honestly, Haynes filmed this movie as if it was the mid-1950’s. The music is pretty cheesy, and the dialog is what you might expect in a Marilyn movie. But what I noticed most was just the awkward cuts between scenes. There were no transitions between scenes like there are today. Instead, a scene just ends, followed by a pause, followed by the start of the next scene. You’d think that would make the movie worse. We have much better technology in every aspect of film-making than we did back then. I feel that usually, when you watch an older movie, you give a good film the benefit of the doubt when it comes to these things. Awkward cutaways can be easily forgotten with a quality story or excellent performances. But if you can have those things and the advanced technology to make a movie more fluid, then why wouldn’t you do it? I think Far From Heaven proves why you don’t do that. I sort of feel like Haynes didn’t just want us to believe it was a story told in the 1950s. I think he wanted us to know that it was a movie being shot in the 1950s. In either case, what I thought might not work for me very well actually worked great. I was impressed with this movie. The second viewing wasn’t as great because the “surprises” were gone. But after my first watch, I knew that this would be a film that I would one day watch again. It was worth the second viewing. It’s not worth a third.

If you could define this movie into a single theme, it would be conforming to society’s standards at the expense of personal happiness. The film stars Julianne Moore (Still Alice, The Hours) as Cathy Whitaker, a homemaker, mother of two, and wife of Frank (Dennis Quaid – Frequency, The Express), a successful executive at a company that sells television advertising. All seems well at home. In fact, a nationally recognized home living type of magazine is at the Whitaker house to do a feature on Cathy and her perfect family and perfect life. It’s all very much Leave It to Beaver at the start of this film, but, of course, if it stayed that way the whole time, we wouldn’t have the them that I presented in the first sentence of this paragraph.

There is a secret here. Specifically, Frank holds a secret that, in the 1950s, would ruin any sense of what is perceived to be a perfect marriage. It’s an issue that we didn’t totally understand back in the 1950s and would ostracize a family man from his position in the corporate world. However, denying this secret is denying his chance at personal happiness. As much as Frank tries to deny this secret or get treatment to overcome it, he cannot. And this causes him to unravel even more by lashing out at Cathy as if it was her fault when, in fact, all she wants to do is help him and try to make him happy.

Cathy has a secret of her own that is frowned upon just as equally in 1950’s America. She has struck a friendship with Raymond Deagan (Dennis Haysbert – television’s 24, television’s The Unit), the servant of Whitaker’s garden. Cathy is an upper-class white woman, while Raymond is a blue-collar black man. Raymond is a kind-hearted man with a child of his own. While just a handyman fixing up the house at first, Cathy realizes that the two have much in common. They quickly strike up a friendship. The problem is that friendships like this did not exist back in that day. The local neighbors begin gossiping about the married white woman spending time with the local black man, especially when the two are seen together in Raymond’s part of the town. Frank is furious that Cathy would make him look so bad by becoming friends with someone she shouldn’t be friends with. He has his anger that he takes out on Cathy because he feels like this is a situation that he can fix through control, whereas he seems unable to do anything about his problems.

This movie is a hard movie to watch at times. It is sad when we are unable to live the lives we want to live. Some difficulties are more difficult to overcome than others. But when we are forced to be a person we are not because of society, that can be difficult. We are a far more accepting society in 2015 than we were in 1952. People, hopefully, have a much easier time being who they want to be. And when someone expresses a problem with someone being who they want to be, I think that person has more resources/security to stick up for themselves. More people will stand up for you when someone is unfair to you. None of the characters in Far From Heaven could be who they wanted to be without ramifications. None of these characters were malicious in any way and forced to make decisions to either conform to society’s standards or go against the norm and suffer the consequences.

Plot 8.5/10
Character Development 7.5/10
Character Chemistry 7.5/10
Acting 8/10
Screenplay 8.5/10
Directing 8/10
Cinematography 9.5/10
Sound 8/10
Hook and Reel 8/10
Universal Relevance 10/10
83.5%

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