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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
The new Todd Haynes film, "Far from Heaven," is set in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1957. Boy, is it set in 1957. The music is right, the decor is right, the pitcher of Daiquiris is right, and even the title of the movie looks right in the opening credits, curving up and across the screen in unabashed swimming-pool blue. Every leaf on every tree has been personally schooled to redden and drop in the approved late-fifties manner. Frankly, after two hours of this stuff I felt embarrassed to be the owner of a cell phone and an occasional user of sushi. I wanted nothing more than a buzz cut, a bourbon, a fridge the size of a car, and a car the size of a killer whale.
Our heroine is Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore), who lives with her husband, Frank (Dennis Quaid), and their two pre-teen children; of a nation crouched in dread of nuclear war there is little sign, although we can be fairly certain that, if the end of the world happened to be nigh, Cathy would politely ask it to wait while she checked that her shoes matched her skirt. Amid a collection of valuable performances, Julianne Moore stands out precisely because she refuses to let her character do the same; no period detail, however fondly researched, can match an actor's willingness to...
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