Review of Far from Heaven (2002) by Matthew B — 31 Aug 2010

While Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows ran along the lines of a Transcendental work, lush with Thoreauesque expectation and hope for a new social flowering in America, Far From Heaven enjoys a grimmer, postmodern glance back to the world of decadent Technicolor and bathetic melodrama.

Julianne Moore provides the finest performance of her career (outmatching her stellar work as the most controversial, and most interesting, of the three chronically unhappy women in Stephen Daldry's The Hours); she vivisects Cathy Whitaker before the viewer, manipulating a world of poise and cocktail dresses to expose an underlying lair of immense sensitivity and unutterable sadness.

Dennis Haysbert (regal as the landscaper Raymond Deagan), Dennis Quaid (unusually adroit as Cathy's poltroon-husband, whose pathetic descent into self-abnegation and alcoholism is as fascinating to behold as Cathy's burgeoning Romance), Bette Henritze, and Patricia Clarkson (crisply paralleling Agnes Moorehead's role in the Sirk melodrama) form a commendable supporting cast.

Elmer Bernstein's score - a direct reference to Frank Skinner's overwrought, Mantovanian work under Sirk - is a major success and an effective emotional compass for the film.