Far From Heaven (12A)

Moore for your money

If there were an Oscar for Best Supporting Leaves it should be awarded to the specimens that glow and wheel so beautifully around Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven. Decked out in autumnal shades of russet, amber and gold, they blend in one shot with the clothes and hair colouring of the four women standing in the garden below, and dance attendance as if trained by some expert leaf choreographer. It's quite a trick to get nature herself to collude with the production design.

The garden belongs to Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore), a mother and house- wife leading a life of picture-perfect respectability in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1957. This is an era when children called their parents "ma'am" and "sir", when women could wear a mink stole and turquoise evening gloves without a twitch of self-consciousness, and men who stayed late at work were not supposed to go cruising strangers in dimly lit bars. Such is the secret life of Cathy's husband, Frank (Dennis Quaid), whom she eventually stumbles on one night in his office, kissing another man.

The Whitakers' suburban idyll begins to fray on both sides. Frank determines to beat his "problem" through psychiatry, but instead takes to dousing his misery in booze. Cathy, meanwhile, finds sympathetic company in her black gardener, Raymond (Dennis Haysbert), and thus exposes herself to the spiteful tittle-tattle of their straitlaced neighbours. By now the combination of lush period detail and social-issue melodrama has flagged its influences for all to see: the writer-director Haynes is paying unabashed homage to the 1950s films of Douglas Sirk, most notably the Jane Wyman-Rock Hudson weepie All That Heaven Allows.

The Sirkian touch is right there in the flaring, saturated colours, in the ubiquity of social drinking (martinis and daiquiris all round) and in the emotional onslaught of Elmer Bernstein's score. It can be heard too in Cathy's quaint exclamations, "Jiminy!" and "Oh jeepers!", though not "Jeez" – "That is not the kind of language we use in this house," she reproves her young son. But Far From Heaven isn't just fond homage; Haynes is delving into taboo areas where no film-maker in Fifties America could go. Back then the idea of mentioning the closet, let alone emerging from it, was unthinkable. His script even dares a "gay" joke when Cathy, flicking through holiday brochures, says: "I hear Miami's just darling – everything's pink." "Then maybe we should try Bermuda instead," quips Frank. Saucy!

As for racism, Sirk dealt with it in Imitation of Life, but he couldn't have risked proposing the attachment between a white and a "coloured" that sets the tongues wagging here. Even Cathy's best friend (Patricia Clarkson), who gives her a shoulder to cry on after Frank comes out, coldly purses up at the prospect of an interracial romance. This "forbidden" love is also an echo of Fassbinder's piercingly sad Fear Eats The Soul (1974), which Haynes has gone on record praising. In that film a middle-aged German cleaning lady marries a young Moroccan immigrant and enters a nightmare of social ostracism, having breached not just the racial divide but the proprieties of age – the woman is no spring chicken, and no Julianne Moore either.

All of which makes Far From Heaven sound like tremendous fun for movie nerds, an intricate puzzle to be unpacked detail by detail. There is a danger that it could suffer the same fate it did in the US, where critics fell over themselves to praise it but the public mostly stayed away. Pastiche, however immaculate, carries an air of selfconsciousness that can be off-putting to audiences, and in the case of the black gardener its revisionism feels over-eager. Haysbert, familiar as the presidential rock of integrity in the television drama 24, is pushed too far here; handsome and educated, Raymond is also a super dad, a man of nature, an art lover and an all-round gentleman. No wonder everybody hates him – he hasn't a single redeeming vice. I'm sure Haysbert reveres Sidney Poitier, but that doesn't mean he should emulate his career.

What raises the film beyond an exercise in mere style is the luminous, troubled performance of Julianne Moore. As the suicidal mother in The Hours, Moore barely said a word but still walked off with the picture. (Some would say she was welcome to it.) While the setting is similar – affluent suburbia in the Fifties – her role under Haynes's direction makes more complicated demands, and she meets them superbly. I can't remember when an actress immersed herself in a period with so little apparent effort. Aware that her marriage is crumbling, Cathy chooses to remain supportive, beaming smiles around the family when most others would be wallowing in howls and hugs; she is stirring proof that "keeping up appearances" can sometimes have the selflessness of courage, even nobility. When Frank breaks down in front of the kids, it's Cathy who shoos them upstairs so that he can pour his heart out and tell her what she dreads to hear. Even then, she refuses self-pity; her most affecting moment comes when she lets Raymond know her marriage is over, not in the aggrieved tone she would be entitled to, but with a rueful, almost English understatement: "It seems that I'm to be single again."

Immensely stylish as it is, Far From Heaven wouldn't be nearly so effective without Moore's heroic performance. Historical distance lends enchantment (the clothes, the manners) but also induces the safety of condescension: look how enlightened we all are now. It might have been more instructive to set the story in 2003 and discover how modern America reacts to a white middle-class housewife hand in hand with her black gardener. Would it be so very different?