Todd Haynes wanted to make a film full of huge, sweeping emotions—and to do that, he had to make it as artificial as possible. That’s how he talked about Far From Heaven, at least, when he promoted the movie in 2002, representing a full-blown Oscar contender for the first time in his idiosyncratic career. A key figure in the indie-film boom of the early ’90s, Haynes was now connected to people with power—his longtime collaborator and Far From Heaven star, Julianne Moore, was now an A-lister, and his Poison producer James Schamus was now the copresident of Far From Heaven’s distributor, Focus Features.
But that didn’t make the awards-season journey for Far From Heaven smooth sailing—and even now, more than a month after Haynes’s newest film, May December, premiered to raves at the Cannes Film Festival, the movie industry still doesn’t seem quite sure what to make of Todd Haynes. On this week’s Little Gold Men podcast, Richard Lawson suggests the answer is simple: As a gay filmmaker who often adopts queer themes in his films, Haynes is still a trailblazer. And as David Canfield explains in the episode, there’s a queer sensibility to Far From Heaven that goes beyond the closeted, tormented character played by Dennis Quaid. Closing out our Oscar Pride Flashback series for June, Far From Heaven is a queer film that, like so many others we’ve covered this month, is far more than meets the eye.
A deeply reverent tribute to, and sometimes explicit remake of, Douglas Sirk’s 1950s melodramas like All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind, Far From Heaven is set in a deliberately artificial version of the 1950s, with Moore as Cathy Whitaker, a homemaker so picture-perfect she could only exist in the movies. The film “maintains a completely synthetic language that comes directly out of the world of film,” as Haynes described it at the time. “And yet it’s done in complete faith that that language in some way embodies more potential for emotional feeling than anything that mimics what we think of as reality.”
Unlike in a film such as Pleasantville, in which the constricting world of the 1950s opens up to something modern, the emotional revelations of Far From Heaven happen entirely within their characters’ limited experience. Cathy’s marriage to Frank (Quaid) falls apart when she learns of his affairs with men; she sparks a deeply emotional friendship with her Black gardener (Dennis Haysbert), but the scandal around the two of them even being seen in public together makes anything more impossible, and outright dangerous. Without a hint of irony or sense of superiority for its present-day viewers, Far From Heaven wrings immense emotion from these scenarios in which no one can quite say how they feel, if they even understand it in the first place. As Sirk did, Haynes uses bold, expressive colors to capture everything under the surface: “Emotions are multicolored. Color, lighting, costume, all the visual elements are supplementing what can’t be said in these films.”
Listen above to this week’s podcast, which also includes a conversation with Franklin Leonard about the Academy’s new theatrical requirements for best-picture contenders, changes Leonard believes might hinder the smaller films in the race. There’s also a discussion of a potentially delayed date for this year’s Emmys and a look at the surprising box office success of Asteroid City, which could mean a brighter future for the challenged specialty-film market.
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