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Julianne Moore and Dennis Haysbert's interracial
relationship is one of the issues explored in Far From
Heaven.
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Actor Dennis Haysbert, best known for playing President David Palmer on the Emmy-winning TV series 24, also plays the pivotal role in Far from Heaven, filmmaker Todd Haynes' melodrama about an affluent married couple struggling to maintain their status quo lifestyle in Eisenhower's America. Haysbert brings calm presence to his role of Raymond Deagan, a widowed gardener who befriends his employer, Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore), after her suburban world is turned upside down by her husband Frank's (Dennis Quaid) sudden unhappiness. Unfortunately, their friendship invites the scorn of Cathy's affluent friends.
"I don't think people really care what the world at large thinks about relationships, whether black and white, Jewish and Native American, Chinese or whatever," Haysbert says, speaking during an afternoon interview. "It's more about families and parents and how they perceive relationships and how they perceive how the world is going to look at it. I don't think the world gives two shakes.
After September 11, we have bigger problems and bigger concerns than who we love ... but the thing about the United States is we still have that 200 years of crud and crap to live through. What we all have to realize is that we are all Americans of various descents."
It's early September, and Far from Heaven is one of the breakout films of the 2002 Toronto Film Festival. The crowds and paparazzi swarm around Moore at the film's gala premiere. Celebrity critic Roger Ebert throws a fit when he can't get into the film's sold-out press screening.
Far from Heaven is a film that has sharply divided critics and audiences. You either love it as an emotional family drama or you dismiss it as a stylized homage to a past film genre. There appears to be no middle ground.
A constant stream of film festival interviews and photo ops keeps Toronto's Intercontinental Hotel busy. Haysbert manages to find a quiet room tucked at the end of one of the hotel's floors. He speaks deliberately, choosing each answer with care.
Haysbert's rich baritone voice and domineering presence easily fills the room. He's friendly and calm, not always easy in an interview situation about a film as stylish as Far from Heaven.
"He's (Haynes) putting it (race) in the foreground," Haysbert says. "He's putting it in the guise of the perfect utopian-like box that everyone would like to see you in, from that period of time. It's just to illustrate that when people look at that place, they it doesn't exist anymore today. Once the film rolls, you see how much it resonates with this time period. The film actually lulls you into a malaise, complacency, and then it slaps you in the face."
Early in Far From Heaven, when a cascade of red and gold autumn leaves fall upon the Whitaker's suburban lawn, it's clear Haynes and cinematographer Edward Lachman have collaborated on one of the most beautiful films of the year. Haynes' challenge is to create a believable story that matches the film's dazzling photography.
Quaid gives a realistic performance as the secretive husband who tears his family apart. Moore shows steady resolve as the wife determined to support her husband. But Haysbert's warm and lifelike performance makes Deagan into the film's most engaging and sympathetic character. His wardrobe and the setting around him was secondary.
"I had nothing to do with the style," he says. "I couldn't control it. I just took what the universe gave me, and I planted myself there and hit my mark and started to speak. I immersed myself in the moment and that moment happened to be 1957. I had the clothes, but the clothes and the surroundings did not dictate what my organic performance would be.
"I thought of myself as a man who was living out of his time. This was a man who saw himself as a human being and not as a colored. I don't call myself an African American. I am an American of African descent. I have nothing to do with Africa. If I went to Africa and told someone that I was an African, they would laugh at me. They would say, 'But your parents were born in America and their parents were born in America.' So I am an American of African descent."
Style and artificiality
A few days earlier, at a packed film festival press conference, the majority of the questions directed at Haynes and his cast focus on the film's setting in the 1950s and its obvious homage to Douglas Sirk melodramas like All That Heaven Allows, where an affluent widow (Jane Wyman) begins a love affair with her young gardener (Rock Hudson), and Imitation of Life, about a black woman (Susan Kohner) who passes herself off as white, much to the chagrin of her housemaid mother (Juanita Moore).
Asked about Far from Heaven's extravagant recreation of '50s America, Moore sums up her role in the film like this: "There is great style and artificiality in the film, which is exciting for an actor. But the people are true."
There are times during the film when Moore appears to be single-handedly supporting Haynes' extreme vision of mid-century suburbia. Her long satin dresses billow at her waist like a parachute.
Moore's dialogue is of the gee-whiz category. Her character, Cathy, often verges on unintentional comedy. Yet Moore says it's the film's deeply moving story that brings everyone back to Earth. This honesty, she says, is what makes Far from Heaven more than a paint-by-numbers homage to Sirk's melodramas. In fact, this honesty is due in part to the impact Sirk's movies have made on us over the years.
"I think of performances by Dorothy Malone, Joan Bennett, Jane Wyman and Doris Day, and it's not the way people behaved in the '50s," Moore says. "It's the way actresses performed in certain types of films in the '50s. But you grow up in the United States, and you see these actresses everyday on television. So you don't see how much their style has been ingrained on us."
The response at Toronto to Far from Heaven was enthusiastic, and it's enjoyed mostly positive responses in the numerous cities where it's opened so far. The key for post-festival audiences is to see Haynes' film as something more than a Sirk retread.
The ultimate goal is that Haynes' film will be declared a favorite for year-end awards. A handful of Golden Globe nominations and Critic's Awards would boost its chances in the upcoming Oscar race. It would also help the film break free of its critic's darling tag and reach crossover audiences. Basically, Haynes realizes that promoting Far From Heaven as a recreated Douglas Sirk film would be the kiss of death for its commercial chances. Yet, on some level, that's exactly what Haynes believes.
"I believe when I wrote it and when we made it that we were aware that we were making a film about the language of films," Haynes says. "Granted, we use these emotions and play with film style, but the film language is in our blood. It's part of our mental and emotional language and how we mediate our experiences."
Emotional deathtraps
Sirk made 21 movies for Universal during the eight years he worked there, from the end of 1950 until 1959. He also made a variety of movies before setting up shop with producer Ross Hunter at Universal, including comedies like Meet Me at the Fair and Has Anybody Seen My Gal? and thrillers like Lured (starring a pre-I Love Lucy Lucille Ball) and Sleep, My Love. But it's Sirk's melodramas, many of them remakes of 1930s Universal movies, that continue to resonate.
In his recently published book, Movie Love in the Fifties, author James Harvey describes Sirk as a "maker of women's picture melodramas about nobly enduring heroines and their domestic-romantic travails." Harvey refers to Sirk as a director who portrayed suburbia as an emotional deathtrap, creating cold interiors pulled straight out of a Better Homes & Gardens magazine.
The same thing applies to Haynes' recreation of the Whitaker family home. It's also an opulent tomb, although this time, its retro style would fit in with a photo spread from Elle Décor or Wallpaper.
Film buffs will take pleasure at the subtle connections between Far From Heaven and a Sirk film like All That Heaven Allows. In Sirk's 1956 drama, Rock Hudson's gardener has plans to open his own greenhouse business. In Far from Heaven, Haysbert's character already owns a greenhouse. Wyman's and Moore's characters both have country club friends named Mona.
The emotions run the gamut from anger to mockery, often bordering on camp. Far from Heaven walks a similar line. Cathy Whitaker's offer of "More daiquiris?" to her lunchtime girlfriends elicits laughs every time I've watched the film. The film's best gag revolves around Cathy and the girls' sex gossip. They laugh about a friend's husband who wants "it" three times on the weekend, although Cathy looks at her friend with a twinge of envy. She clearly desires a husband who also wants "it".
Sirk's films were ridiculed by almost everyone other than the suburban couples who flocked to watch them. In Far from Heaven, Cathy cheeriness and fashionable normalcy often border on parody. Haynes says he set out to tell a story that would make audiences cry. Yet, laughter is a constant companion to the tears in the film.
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Photo By Steve Ramos
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(L-R) Far From Heaven's Dennis Quaid, Julianne
Moore and Dennis Haysbert pose during a press
conference at the 2002 Toronto Film Festival.
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Far from highfalutin'
It's six weeks after the Toronto festival, and Haynes is busy promoting his film. He calls from Seattle, his last stop after attending the film's New York City premiere, before returning home to Portland, Ore. He admits it's been an ordeal, but he doesn't regret it for one minute.
The 41-year-old filmmaker has always been a critic's darling, from his debut film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, an avant-garde biopic made with Barbie dolls, to Safe, about a sickly housewife protecting herself against toxins, to Velvet Goldmine, a drama set in the world of '70s Glitter Rock. Far from Heaven has also won its share of critical praise. More importantly, it looks to be Haynes' first film that has a shot at achieving sizable audiences and Oscar contention.
"It's hard for me to see my exact role vis-à-vis popular culture, but I always saw myself occupying a marginal position in that world," Haynes says, laughing. "But this movie might start to threaten my marginality."
Far from Heaven is different from Sirk's films because it's a story from the director's own head and heart. The film is a Sirk homage, but it's also Haynes' version of a Sirk homage.
Haynes sees it like this: Far from Heaven is not just about an America of 50 years ago. Its themes of racism and social trappings are just as relevant today. In fact, its '50s setting helps show just how little things have changed when it comes to tolerance.
Yet Haynes understands when publicists for the film get nervous around all the talk about Sirk. They don't want to scare people away from considering Far from Heaven as some film buff's experiment. Then again, Haynes sees nothing wrong if audiences leave the film learning something about '50s melodramas.
"I think particular films that I see being played as serious films that everyone should go see often teach you something new," Haynes says. "A Beautiful Mind introduced you to the scientist John Nash, and the public learned about his life and schizophrenia and blah, blah, blah. Part of the experience is about being enlightened. So I don't see a lesson about Douglas Sirk to be so alienating.
I hear this 10 times a day. People tell me that they want to take their moms to my movie. That immediately suggests to me that's its not so highfalutin'. I think outside the film savvy world, you can get into it purely for its content." ©
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