Far from Heaven (2002)

Todd Haynes builds his 2002 melodrama on the bones of Douglas Sirk, and the scaffolding holds. Cathy Whitaker has the house, the husband, the children and the pressed linen, and within twenty minutes the arrangement is revealed as a cage with good wallpaper. The film runs two engines of taboo in parallel: Frank's closeted homosexuality, complete with Hartford's basement bars and a course of conversion therapy, and Cathy's growing attachment to Raymond Deagan, the Black gardener who inherited his father's accounts. Neither thread is decorative. Each one is permitted to destroy a life on screen, and the destruction is filmed with the same even, amber light as the dinner parties.

The racial material arrives with unusual directness. A lunch counter refuses the pair a seat. A Miami hotel empties its pool when a Black child enters the water. Little Rock flickers from a television set as context no one discusses. Dennis Haysbert gives Raymond a full interior life and a dignity the screenplay keeps testing, and Viola Davis makes her few minutes count. The community's punishment is thorough: Raymond's business collapses, his neighbors throw rocks through his windows, and his daughter is assaulted by boys working from rumor alone.

Haynes also takes a hammer to the housewife ideal, presenting Cathy's celebrated domestic competence as a job with no exit and no pay. The revisionism is deliberate. The autumn leaves, the Elmer Bernstein score and the saturated color exist to be peeled back. The film lectures at moments when it should trust its own surfaces, and a few exchanges land with the thud of a seminar. Its economic critique stays thin, more concerned with the emptiness of affluence than the machinery of it. What survives is a precise, sorrowful apparatus, and the farewell at the train station is the quietest devastation in the director's filmography.