Gay Directors, Gay Films? by Levy Emanuel;

Author:Levy, Emanuel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video/History & Criticism, SOC012000, Social Science/Gay Studies
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2015-08-24T16:00:00+00:00

WOMAN’S MELODRAMA: FAR FROM HEAVEN

Like other directors, Haynes has dealt with gay identities and lifestyles, though in deconstructive ways. Velvet Goldmine and Far from Heaven depict the perennial topic of gay-themed films: coming out. Yet even then, the coming out is just one issue in films whose scope was much broader.

In 2002, Haynes achieved the greatest critical acclaim and commercial success of his career with Far from Heaven, a family drama inspired by Sirk’s stylish 1950s melodramas. The German-born, Hollywood-based Sirk continues to influence filmmakers (both American and foreign) over half a century after his last American work, Imitation of Life in 1959, and decades after his death. Far from Heaven had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, where Julianne Moore won the Best Actress Award. The film was released in the United States by Focus Features and its box-office receipts totaled about $15 million, outgrossing all of Haynes’s features put together, especially after winning a number of major awards, including Best Film from the New York Film Critics Circle.

Like Safe, the narrative concerns a suburban housewife, here named Cathy Whitaker (Moore), who is thrown into a major identity crisis by unanticipated circumstances. Set in 1957, the nominal plot, the surface text, is rather simple: the effects of Cathy’s discovery that her husband, Frank (Dennis Quaid), is a latent homosexual. After a painful divorce, she falls in love with Raymond Deagan (Dennis Haysbert), her longtime African-American gardener, whom she had barely noticed before. However, as always with Haynes, it’s the rich and dense subtext, the attention to detail, and the meticulous reconstruction of the era and its fashions that make the film more interesting than just another period melodrama or homage to Sirk in narrative structure, visual look, and even music (by Elmer Bernstein).

From the start, we sense Cathy’s feelings that “something” isn’t quite right in her presumably ideal marriage. Frank begins working later and later, canceling dinners at the very last moment, and spending less time with Cathy. He seems easily irritable and more distant, both physically and emotionally. Their two children also feel neglected by their dad. One day, after yet another call that he needs to work late, Cathy goes to Frank’s office to bring him dinner, fulfilling her duties as a housewife. Quietly opening the door, Cathy discovers something she had never expected, her husband in a compromised position with another man—the office’s lights are dim, and the shirts of the two men are open. The mysterious homosexual leaves the office, and Cathy runs out in panic, dropping the dinner on the floor.

Prior to this traumatic experience, Cathy and Frank represented a perfect married couple living a perfectly harmonious suburban life in a nicely decorated house, overseen by a respectful black housekeeper, Sybil (Viola Davis). When the film begins, the couple is interviewed by a gossipy journalist for a popular magazine article as a “model family.” They live in a beautiful home and raise two healthy and obedient children. Frank pursues a successful career in sales, and Cathy is a full-time housewife.

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