Far from Heaven (2002)
Directed by Todd Haynes
In 1950s Connecticut, a housewife's life is upended by a marital crisis and mounting racial tensions in society.
17 connections found
View:
17 connections, in both directions
What critics compared Far from Heaven to
Think of Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven (2002), a film with the aesthetic sense, feel and mores of the 1950s, but with an added layer of modern sensibilities.
You wouldn’t be wrong, but what Biller is trying to create is a cinematic treatise very much akin to what Todd Haynes did with his Douglas Sirk inspired melodrama “Far From Heaven.”
But other of his works, including the Julianne Moore-starring "Far From Heaven" and the James M. Cain "Mildred Pierce" adaptation for HBO, have a visual look that the technicians of Hollywood's Golden Age might envy.
“Carol” is the latest film from director Todd Haynes (“Far From Heaven”), and arguably his best.
They would be being themselves in the 1950s, an era director Todd Haynes (“Far From Heaven”) excels at capturing.
Director Todd Haynes went deeper and farther with 2002’s acclaimed “Far From Heaven,” another melodrama inspired by prolific '50s director Douglas Sirk.
If that's true, then Carol, the romantic drama from director Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven), goes one step further by photographing the photo of the photo, and thereby creating a hazy, distant depiction of forbidden love.
An obvious companion piece to Haynes’ “Far From Heaven” and “Mildred Pierce,” and no less painstaking in its intricate re-creation of a mid-20th-century American milieu, the Weinstein Co. drama (set for a Dec. 18 release) should have little trouble translating critical plaudits, especially for Cate Blanchett ’s incandescent lead performance, into significant year-end attention.
It's interesting how this film deals with many of the same themes as American Beauty, but with an even more steady hand and perhaps even more earth-shaking insight.
The film is very much in the vein of the now-classic dysfunctional family drama, juggling the outlines and some specific themes from "The Ice Storm" and "American Beauty" like an older relative that is being rediscovered.
It’s the sort of tragic gay melodrama that stood out in many a fall film festival in Toronto and New York, not quite Douglas Sirk era guarded and 1950s oblique, but something that would have been considered sexually “daring” as recently as Todd Haynes’ homage to Sirk, 2002’s “Far from Heaven.”
Advertisement
This is del Toro’s Beauty and the Beast with the delicate time period touches and social awareness of Far from Heaven.
Del Toro is working in the vein of Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven , which revisited an extinct genre (in that case, 1950s melodrama) and applied the sort of details that wouldn’t have been countenanced at the time.
A film like Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven brought whole libraries of erudition to his variations on themes from Douglas Sirk.
It almost feels like someone took Far From Heaven (2002) and The Hours (2002), flattened out all of the depth and nuance of their commentary, put it through a Stepford Wives filter, replaced all of the characters with uninteresting archetypes, and called it a day.
His intention seems, however, closer to that of Todd Haynes in Far From Heaven: an attempt to use earlier vocabularies to investigate slightly less fantastic, slightly more nuanced lives.
Advertisement
Meanwhile, their hostess Judy Nash (Patricia Clarkson, "Far from Heaven," "Married Life"), whom Vicky catches kissing a man other than her husband (Kevin Dunn, "Transformers," "Lions for Lambs"), believes that Vicky is going down the same unhappy path she has and tries to put Vicky back into José Antonio's path.
Patricia Clarkson (Far from Heaven, Easy A) is good as always in her brief turn as Dex's doting, terminally ill mother.