Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12631 in DVD
• Released on: 2003-10-20
• Rating: Suitable for 12 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 1.77:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 107 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
Far from Heaven is a uniquely beautiful film from one of the smartest and most idiosyncratic of contemporary directors, Todd Haynes (Safe and Velvet Goldmine). It takes the lush 1950s visual style of so-called women's pictures (particularly those of Douglas Sirk, director of Imitation of Life and Magnificent Obsession) to tell a story that mixes both sexual and racial prejudice. Julianne Moore, portraying an amazing fusion of vulnerability and will power, plays a housewife whose husband (Dennis Quaid) has a secret gay life. When she finds solace in the company of a black gardener (Dennis Haysbert), rumours and peer pressure destroy any chance she has at happiness. It's astonishing how a movie with such a stylised veneer can be so emotionally compelling; the cast and filmmakers have such an impeccable command of the look and feel of the genre that every moment is simultaneously artificial and deeply felt. Far from Heaven is ingenious and completely engrossing. --Bret Fetzer

Synopsis
The model marriage of Frank (Dennis Quaid) and Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore) in 1950s Hartford is depicted in television ads, and a magazine features photographs of Cathy as a model homemaker and citizen. Yet, behind the curtains of their dream home, Cathy and Frank hide scandalous secrets. Frank has been masquerading his homosexuality and is seeing a doctor for a heterosexual conversion. Meanwhile, Cathy finds solace in her gardener, Raymond (Dennis Haysbert), a black man about whom Cathy must conceal her growing feelings, since simply being seen with him is cause for scandal.
Filmmaker Douglas Sirk employed the trappings of the melodrama to satirise and criticise narrow minds in the 1950s status quo with films such as ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS. Todd Haynes (SAFE) uses Sirk's highly stylised universe to critique society half a century later in FAR FROM HEAVEN. The film uses thematic elements of Sirk's such as isolating characters through windows and vivid, symbolic colours and flowers. It also applies Sirkian plot devices such as gossiping neighbours and demonising television. Attacking prejudice, Haynes' methods are particularly effective as he uses an antiquated style of filmmaking to shed light on societal problems that are pervasive even in the 21st Century.

From the Back Cover
In the Fall of 1957 in Connecticut, Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore) is returning home from a day of errands. Her husband, Frank (Dennis Quaid), is expected home for a dinner engagement. There’s only one problem, no one has heard from Frank all afternoon.

What begins as a curious snapshot of 1950s American values is soon transformed into a tangle of competing conflicts, igniting Cathy’s friendships with her formidable gardener, Raymond (Dennis Haysbert), her plucky best friend and her maid. As secrets are revealed, Cathy is faced with choices that spur hatred and gossip within the community.

Customer Reviews

The dark side of Father Knows Best
If you've been around long enough to remember those 50s shows like "Father Knows Best", you'll remember how perfect life for the American WASP middle class was depicted as being. Perfect father, mother, marriage, children (or at least reasonably well behaved), job (for Dad - Mom stayed home), house, schools, and neighborhood. If there was a dark side, it didn't extend further than one of the Anderson kids complaining about having to help set the perfect table for the perfect home-cooked dinner. America had single-handedly won WWII (what Eastern Front?) and was keeping the world safe for democracy. Ike was President, and life was grand. For those of us who lived even a close approximation, it was.

FAR FROM HEAVEN begins just that way. Frank Whitaker (Dennis Quaid) and his All-American blonde wife Cathy (Julianne Moore) - the high school cheerleader/prom queen sort who probably married right after graduation - own a perfect (and huge) home in a perfect neighborhood of Hartford, CN where you can't see the perfect neighbors for all the trees (gloriously clothed in perfect fall colors). The Whitakers have two perfect kids, and Frank manages the local office of mighty Magnatech. It's 1957, and when the Whitaker boy says "Oh, gee!", Mom reprimands him for his bad language. Frank wears a suit, tie and hat; Cathy wears full skirts and is perfectly coifed. In this all-white world, the only Blacks are the perfect housekeeper Sybil (Viola Davis) and the perfect gardener Ray (Dennis Haysbert). But there's a flip side.

In the film's leading role, Moore turns in an Oscar-worthy performance as the 50s-perfect wife whose perfect life implodes on the day she discovers hubby, ostensibly working late, in his office passionately kissing another man. And she's so pathetically grateful when Frank reluctantly consents to undergo psychiatric treatment. But then, in her growing loneliness, she befriends Ray, who's just taken over his deceased father's yard maintenance business. Ray is educated, sensitive, soft-spoken, gentle, and the single father of a young daughter. One day, Cathy accepts Ray's offer to take her on a short errand out of town to pick up some shrubs. On the way back, they stop for lunch at a roadhouse. Cathy is seen exiting Ray's truck by a local gossip, who soon pours gasoline on the smoldering racism of the Whitakers' neighbors. Even Cathy's best friend Eleanor (Patricia Clarkson) is appalled. Finally, thinking all is at least approaching right again with Frank (who's undergoing that therapy, remember?), off Cathy and her troubled spouse go for an idyllic winter vacation in Miami, a place peopled with handsome young men. Oh oh, big mistake.

In a role very different from the congenial characters recently played in FREQUENCY and THE ROOKIE, Quaid is darkly effective as the tortured Frank. And Haysbert is perhaps another Denzel Washington in the making. The "look" of the film is superb, recreating the fashion, cars, home and office decor, and technology of the period to an uncanny degree.

FAR FROM HEAVEN gives the viewers a glimpse at the dark side of an ideal time perhaps existing only in nostalgia and Norman Rockwell prints. It presages the turmoil and changes in a society on the verge of irrevocable evolution. For American audiences, this deserves to be a great film. For foreign audiences who didn't share in America's 50s bounty, it may be something less, but at least they can see where we come from.

i looked beneath the surface and it was PERFECT...
I think this movie is the best movie to come out of hollywood in years. I really identified with Dennis Quaids character and felt equally sorry for his wife played with genius by Julliane Moore. The ending was very moving and I felt sad that many of the issues dealt with in the movie are still problems with some people today. I was also impressed with the use of colour in the movie and was suprised to discover that no digital tweaking or colour enhancment was used on the film. Overall i think the picture should have won more at the acadamy awards, its not often that this much care and attention goes into a movie aimed at the masses. Simply Wonderful.

This film oozes...
Todd Haynes' "Far From Heaven," the best film of the year, is the kind of movie lover's dream that requires more suspension of disbelief than your usual fantasy or musical. It demands a willingness of the viewer to be transported back to a time when movies were shot on studio back lots and came with a lush artificiality and a distinct archness.
Like "8 Women," the current FranÁois Ozon French romp, "Far From Heaven" gets its inspiration from the florid melodramas that director Douglas Sirk made in collaboration with producer Ross Hunter at Universal, working within the 1950s studio system. However, whereas Ozon has fun, merely flirting with signature Sirk ingredients, Haynes is serious and goes further. He re-creates Sirk's soapy tableaux with such a single-minded, virtuosic flair that his bid for perfection becomes an unconstrained fetish.
The result is a film that works as a tribute to a specific bygone film genre and style, but also to the era itself -- the 1950s in all its repressed, hypocritical glory. "Far From Heaven" doesn't merely play like a '50s-style movie. It is a '50s movie. Except for a couple of taboo issues that Haynes has moved from the background into the forefront, he's created a film that looks and feels as if it was made in 1957, the year in which his story is set.
The old-style opening credits immediately signal that we are in Eisenhower's America, where the notion of "normalcy" is a lie that shrouds the real desires and needs of people. Sirk's camera would trail behind his glamourous leading ladies (usually Jane Wyman, Lana Turner or Dorothy Malone) and peer through the openings of the curtains that concealed the secrets within their perfectly attired suburban homes.
Haynes does the same, but he opens those drapes little by little to expose the hidden truths.
Julianne Moore (made up here to look like Malone) is Cathy, a housewife and society matron who lives in the fashionable section of Hartford, Conn. At first, we have a tendency to peg Cathy. In order of importance, she has it all -- social standing, a knockout wardrobe, a splendid Colonial home with all the modern conveniences (and a maid), two beautiful children and a handsome husband with a good career.
Dennis Quaid, continuing an amazing comeback, is Frank Whitaker, Cathy's husband and top sales executive at something called Magnatech. At weekly cocktail parties, Cathy and Frank are toasted as "Mr. and Mrs. Magnatech."
Yes, it's easy to judge Cathy by her acquisitiveness, but, as we quickly learn, she's a really nice woman with a streak of decency that will prove to be her undoing. Trouble starts to brew on the day Cathy greets her new gardener -- Raymond Deagan (Dennis Haysbert) -- who has taken over for his late father. A reporter is in Cathy's living room, there to do a society column on her and Frank, and the woman happens to see Cathy touch the shoulder of Raymond -- who is "colored" -- as Cathy consoles him.
When the column appears, describing Cathy as "a woman as devoted to her family as she is kind to Negroes," the good (white) people of Hartford are aghast, even Cathy's best friend, the otherwise liberal-minded Eleanor Fine (Patricia Clarkson in a wonderfully wicked turn). Meanwhile, Frank starts acting peculiar, following other men into dark alleys, movie theaters and bars. On one occasion, Cathy has to bail him out of jail following a vague, drunken "indiscretion." "All because of one lousy drink," Frank complains.
She has no idea what's going on. Why, Cathy's offended when their son, Davey, uses expressions like "jeez" and "jiminy." But, late one night, she discovers the truth. Frank calls home and says he has to work late. So Cathy decides to surprise him by taking his supper into the office -- where she catches Frank passionately kissing another man. She insists that he see a doctor. Frank agrees and goes into "aversion therapy" and, although no "cure" is promised, he beams, "I'm going to beat this thing," as if he's talking about his drinking problem.
While this may read like a parody, "Far From Heaven" never plays that way. Frank's self-loathing, for example, becomes more evident, with Frank saying, "I know this is a sickness because I feel despicable." No, the film is played straight, and we are immediately absorbed by the societal restrictions of the time.
As Frank continues his dalliances with his new lover and gets ugly at home, Cathy endures her pain and falls into the arms of Raymond. Eleanor, who can halfway accept Frank's homosexuality, can't tolerate Cathy's relationship with Raymond. Soon there is gossip and, in a scene that underlines the hypocrisy of the times, Frank finds out about Cathy and Raymond and yells at his wife about how she is ruining the reputation of the family.
"Far From Heaven" is a triumph of style, from its sets to its acting. Haynes gives his film an aura reminiscent of waxed fruit, one of the era's more curious household acoutrements. And his cast members all look as if they are posing for an old Life magazine spread, with both Moore and Quaid giving their best performances to date (and, in Quaid's case, his bravest) as their characters speak in '50s-style code.
The film oozes craft. If there's any justice in Hollywood (and, unfortunately, there usually isn't), "Far From Heaven" should sweep this year's Oscars come March 23, with statuettes going to Haynes (for both his direction and his script) and the film itself, along with Moore (best actress), Quaid (best actor), Clarkson (supporting actress), Haysbert (supporting actor), Edward Lachman (cinematography), James Lyons (editing), Mark Friedberg (production design), Sandy Powell (costumes) and the great Elmer Bernstein, who has written the quintessential Elmer Bernstein score for this utterly flawless movie -- again, the year's best.