Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven is a melodrama that is also a pastiche of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955). The film reframes a familiar love story within the un-romantic confines of American history. Both Haynes and Sirk’s films center on the relationship between an upper-class woman and her charming gardener. They are portrayed by Julianne Moore and Dennis Haysbert, and Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson, respectively. Visually, Haynes abandons verisimilitude and leans into artifice, adopting popular cinematic techniques from the 1950s—sweeping pans and dutch angles. He and cinematographer Ed Lachman also recreate Technicolor’s characteristically saturated reds, as seen in Sirk’s films. While adhering to Sirk’s meticulous and austere visual style, Haynes departs from Sirk’s soapier sensibilities in his narrative; in turn, creating a more challenging and politically sober drama.
Where Sirk focuses on a romance that blooms within the confines of regressive community scorn, Haynes further contextualizes this relationship in a 1950s Connecticut experiencing de facto segregation. In All That Heaven Allows, community ire is directed at Rock Hudson because of his character’s blue-collar background. But in its most pronounced departure from the 1955 film, Far From Heaven combines these class politics with those of race. Raymond Deagan, played by Haysbert, is the most prominent Black character in the film, but just one of many who face the prejudice of his community. Within the grand Hartford mansions, there are Black waitstaff and housekeepers scattered amongst the white suburbanites. While Hudson’s gardener embodies a bucolic ideal against the rigid and frivolous neighborhood, Haynes further presents the stigmatized population as an underclass that maintains the lacquered, suburban lifestyle they enjoy.
Moreover, in Hayne’s version, the hunky gardener is not an unburdened and devoted lover; Deagan has obligations toward his young daughter. Cathy Whitaker, portrayed by Moore, is married with young children, unlike Wyman’s widowed empty nester. Haynes’s film considers the nuclear family as an obstacle to social progress, as violence and ostracization toward children is leveraged as punishment for their parents’ imprudence. His decision to impose greater material consequences is not simply about raising the emotional stakes in the film; Richard and Mildred Loving were convicted of violating segregated marriage only a couple years after these fictional events.
Haynes further challenges the fantasy of suburban Americana that is satirized in Sirk’s films. Though Sirk himself openly criticized the farcical nature of their studio-mandated, feel-good endings, which “express the weak and sly promise that the world is not rotten and out of joint but meaningful and ultimately in excellent condition.” In All That Heaven Allows, a supernatural miracle grants Wyman and Hudson’s characters their happy ending with great irony. As the title Far From Heaven suggests, the idyllic suburban life is only a cultural mirage. Within a political and material reality, heaven cannot exist.
Far From Heaven screens Sunday evening as the last film of a weekend with Todd Haynes in person, the opening weekend of BAMPFA's near-complete Haynes retrospective, Far From Safe.
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