Far from Heaven

Like a painting by Miró, Haynes’s movie welcomes us into a world of basic shapes and colors. Colors that are vivid, warm and inviting. Here, what it is, is never what it seems and what it seems is never what it is. This is a world of pretend and false pretenses. A world of fictionalized lives that are cracking under the tensions of reality. Real emotions, real feelings, real urges and strong impulses are no longer able to be confined within the boundaries of a misplaced sense of morality and bigotry. This is the story of a family living in a world thats is collapsing onto itself. And it is told in a most beautiful and tasteful way. The stylization. The imagery. The close-ups and the simple gestures that deliver so much inner tension and passion with the smallest of details. We see a mother, beautifully played by Julianne Moore, constantly keeping her son from approaching and reaching out to his father, and we finally understad that she does it out of fear of him getting the gay disease, in an act of bigotry, that emulates the same naivity and ignorant behavior that her neighbours carry, while gossiping about her relationship with her black gardner. From shape, form, color, and content, there are such dense and big questions and answers to be had from the most mundane events. And it’s all set to a period tune, tone and style - from the melodramatic tracks to the naive way the characters behave, we don’t just feel like watching a story set in the 50’s but also made in that era (only the movies made back then would never approach the same subjects).