FAR FROM HEAVEN (2002). Writer/director Todd Haynes (Poison, Safe, Velvet Goldmine) pays homage to the Hollywood melodrama of the '50s with this big-budget pastiche in which homosexuality and interracial love are the overt themes. His film is set in 1957 Hartford, where TV manufacturer Frank Whitaker (Dennis Quaid) and his devoted wife, Cathy (Julianne Moore), are a Sunday-supplement couple with a perfect house, two nice kids, and a black maid, Sybil (Viola Davis). But Frank is an alcoholic with a penchant for furtive gay sex. Isolated and deprived of emotional support, Cathy becomes drawn to her black gardener, Raymond (Dennis Haysbert). Haynes studiously re-creates certain aspects of Douglas Sirk's style, but whereas in Sirk and Nicholas Ray, style, however extreme, always correlates with story and character, the style of Far from Heaven is also a conspicuous comment on itself. After Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, the movie that this one most resembles is John Waters's Hairspray -- but whereas in Hairspray Waters exceeds expectations for musicals by addressing racial integration and body image, Haynes, in choosing the melodrama as his form, raises expectations that he doesn't fulfill: he actually does less than what melodramas can do, and did. (107m)

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