Far from Heaven Frida From Hartford to Mexico City
Cooper, Rand Richards
SCREEN Rand Richards Cooper ART DECO 'Far from Heaven' & 'Frida' A pair of films offers variations on the theme of passion and its impediments and privileges. Far from Heaven, Todd Haynes's...
...The way Haynes reproduces the old films' look and feel, while injecting contemporary content, is almost bizarre...
...The Whitaker children sound straight out of Leave It to Beaver ("Gee, Pop, think you could come to my game on Saturday...
...In one wild party scene she bests both Rivera (the always superb Alfred Molina) and fellow painter David Alfaro Siqueiros (Antonio Banderas, in a cameo) in a tequila-drinking dare, then boldly claims the prize, dancing an erotic tango with photographer Tina Modotti (Ashley Judd...
...With its deep autumnal tones, Far from Heaven portrays hope smothered by grief and despair...
...And so off they go, Frank and Cathy, on twin plunges into the void...
...and the arrival points of the plot have the blatantness of parody...
...the bold hues of Mexican courtyards and markets and folk art...
...While Far from Heaven puts so-cial damnation in the way of desire, Frida, a biopic chronicling the Mexican surrealist painter Frida Kahlo and her stormy on-again, off-again marriage to Diego Rivera, explores the opposite, passion without conventional limitations of any kind...
...Kahlo's life was the stuff of legend-wife of Rivera but also lover of Trotsky, and of Josephine Baker in Paris...
...It's a complicated game, reproducing an entire set of conventions this faithfully...
...who aggressively seeks out the famous artist and presents herself both as fawning acolyte and taunting ingenue...
...In Frida, characters rise and fall and rise and fall again, their vicissitudes driven by impulsive appetites and angers, their lives flaring like the fireworks on the festival castillos, and haunted by the skeletal figures of the Day of the Dead...
...the family's sky-blue, fin-tailed station wagon: every shot is a page torn from Look magazine...
...Visually blurring the line between fantasy and reality, Taymor succeeds in suggesting the nature of a painter's imagination...
...Reeling from her discovery, Cathy finds solace in the company of her gardener, Raymond (Dennis Haysbert), who in addition to being charming, sensitive, handsome, and eloquent about modern art, also happens to be black...
...the emerald and scarlet and gold of Kahlo's dresses...
...When rumor circulates that Cathy has been seen having lunch with a Negro, ostracism is instant and total: after her daughter's ballet performance, the other mothers clutch their girls and stare at Cathy in horror, as if she has leprosy...
...Canvases of Kahlo's morph into life, and back again...
...Even the opening credits are a lavish period-piece genuflection, splashed.across the screen in giant blue letters as Elmer Bernstein's score throbs with orchestral emotion (Bernstein, who wrote the score for To Kill A Mockingbird, has been making magnificent film music for over fifty years...
...The beautiful Salma Hayek plays Frida with seductive, audacious energy-a girl from the educated classes who discusses Marxian dialectics...
...It's not easy to do an artist's life justice, but Taymor succeeds...
...Moore's and Quaid's performances are quite moving, and could easily be the stuff of realist drama...
...Imagine someone writing a Dickensian novel, in nineteenth-century prose, about a latchkey kid on Ritalin...
...But is this a send-up of these films, or a loving act of praise...
...And writer/director Haynes is not content with sending just one of the Whitak-ers up against a big taboo...
...It's fascinating to watch him work this jarring anachronism to his advantage, lulling us, through the look and sound of his movie, into filmic conventions of a half century ago, only to bring us rocketing back with moments of brutal frankness and anger no screenwriter could have gotten away with in 1957...
...Her film is a small, glowing tour de force...
...Far from Heaven takes its inspiration from those big 1950s melodramas made by such directors as Douglas Sirk, whose All That Heaven Allows is echoed in the title-swoony tearjerkers that were treated harshly by critics of the time...
...Kahlo lived at a high pitch of intensity, and Frida captures the enduring romance of bohemianism, its political and sexual liberation, the drinking and dancing and big arguments about big ideas...
...Any deviation from the society-page party line means retribution in the form of slights, cuts, and tribal shunning...
...Director Julie Taymor is a trained puppeteer who engineered the Broadway version of The Lion King-she also directed the hallucinatory film adaptation of Titus-and she brings a vivid and playful surrealism to her handling of Kahlo's art...
...Frank's late-modernist office at Mag-natech...
...Up to now, Cathy has been safe within her upper-middle-class WASP world-view...
...A horrific streetcar accident in her youth bequeathed Kahlo a lifetime of suffering...
...The women's dresses, for instance-perfectly color coordinated not merely with one another, but with the foliage...
...He belongs only to himself...
...And because the film conventions mirror the social ones, the end effect, oddly, is nostalgia for an oppressive era: the magnificent sadness of propriety relentlessly thwarting all dreams, making heaven a ghostly intimation of happiness, and exile a perpetual longing...
...But Haynes surrounds them with stylizations so extravagant, you gape your way through the movie...
...Frida charts the perils of open marriage, the exhilaration and the danger of venturing everything on passion...
...Diego has never belonged to anyone," the ex-wife later warns her...
...I'm hard put to recall a movie in recent decades at once so campy-seeming and yet so earnest...
...the men play golf and do business and in general exhibit the emotional range of jellyfish...
...In the Insurance Capital of America during the thick of the Eisenhower era, conformity is pursued with fanatical zeal, behavior monitored and controlled by an extensive network of gossip...
...Far from Heaven, Todd Haynes's sumptuous homage to Hollywood melodramas of yore, is set in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1957...
...Ultimately, the formula is a way for Haynes to have it all: Far from Heaven is at once swooning visual tribute, parody, and earnest tearjerker...
...But when her business executive husband Frank (Dennis Quaid) falls into a midlife crisis involving, of all things, a persistent homoerotic desire, it all unravels...
...I'm going to beat this thing," Quaid grimly mutters, as if homosexuality were cancer...
...she has the glow of someone who takes unex-amined happiness as a birthright...
...Rivera himself was a notorious womanizer-Kahlo is outraged, the morning after their wedding night, to find that one of his ex-wives is living upstairs and in fact has cooked the breakfast Kahlo is eating...
...In 1957 Hartford, there's only one thing worse than men desiring men, and that's whites desiring blacks...
...Far from Heaven hurls the irresistible force of illicit desire against the immovable object of social convention, sparking fear and shame...
...Where the palette of Far from Heaven is rigidly controlled-it's the least vibrant splashy film you'll ever see- Frida explodes with color: Kahlo and Rivera's vivid paintings...
...The Whitaker living room, upholstered in rust-orange and aqua...
...From here on in, you might say, it's life beyond the pale...
...and many of her paintings explicitly took on the subject of her own pain, both physical and psychic...
...Amid this narrowness, Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore) seems passively content...
...The wives occupy themselves plotting vast strategic parties and chatting with their maids...
...at a scene in New York City, where Rivera binges on public adoration, Kahlo sits in a theater watching King Kong-with Rivera as the ape, astride the Empire State Building...
Vol. 130 • January 2003 • No. 1
