And of course, both "Far From Heaven" and "Down With Love" hark on themes that would have been unmentionable in the movies of Sirk or Gordon. Homosexuality is the most prominent one, and that's not surprising when you consider that Rock Hudson frequently acted in films from both genres, including "Magnificent Obsession" and "Pillow Talk." Homosexuality is behind the cruel destruction of Moore's marriage in "Far From Heaven" and the subject of a jokey romantic misunderstanding between two supporting characters in "Down With Love." Furthermore, the chief dilemmas tackled in each film -- relations between the races in "Far From Heaven" and the sexes in "Down With Love" -- are still painfully difficult in contemporary life. Both films treat those questions in ways no '50s movie ever could have.

Nevertheless, neither movie feels obliged to take a clear-cut "position" on the '50s themselves. Compare the nostalgic view of that decade vaunted in TV's "Happy Days" or the critical approach in the 1998 film "Pleasantville," in which contemporary teens are magically transported into an oppressively wholesome black-and-white '50s sitcom world and gradually liberate it with the color of more up-to-date attitudes. According to "Happy Days," the '50s were good, an innocent, healthy time when kids drank milkshakes, danced at sock hops and went home to comfy nuclear families. In "Pleasantville," the '50s were bad, stultifying and conformist.

You could say that the visions of the '50s offered by both "Happy Days" and "Pleasantville" aren't any more realistic than those in "Far From Heaven" and "Down With Love." And you'd be right. But unlike the two more recent films, "Happy Days" and "Pleasantville" take definite stands on the decade: for and against, respectively. "Far From Heaven" and "Down With Love" remain ambiguous. Crushing and wrong as the racism that ruins Moore's second chance at happiness may be, she's barely aware of it until her marriage falls apart. She's not one of Friedan's restless housewives, worn down by the "problem that has no name"; the trouble she senses within her husband is the only real cloud in an otherwise satisfying life. Before the fall, hers is a gracious, lovely, orderly world, not the soul-sapping monochrome limbo of "Pleasantville."

Likewise, the New York City of "Down With Love" is a candy-colored never-never land of great outfits and glamorous apartments, where the only thing holding a girl back from making it to the top of the business world are the pesky entanglements of romance. Zellweger's character is more Helen Gurley Brown than Doris Day -- she wants to have attachment-free sex with McGregor, but in order to execute a complicated scheme, he fends her off. She anticipates no negative consequences and runs into few obstacles in pursuing worldly success and premarital nookie. What she'll do after she marries remains something of a mystery.

Again, the '50s in question here aren't the actual decade -- as historians have pointed out, in reality those years saw upsurges in working wives and single mothers and extramarital sex. No, this is "the '50s" as a cultural totem, the fetish of an idealized society composed of married, church-going, heterosexual couples living in tidy suburban homes and raising fresh-faced kids who rode their bikes to school, attended all the football games, and married as virgins. It's the notion of American life conjured up by the expression "family values."

This vision of the '50s has always been a political one, a lodestone for American society, and for many people it continues to be. For such viewers, a movie like "Far From Heaven" must either agitate for a return to that nonexistent way of life, or point out that it was, indeed, far from heaven. But to filmmakers like Haynes and Reed, the '50s, the world on the cusp of civil rights and feminism, is just an interesting setting, a great way to throw virtuous sympathetic characters into conflict with their world. The social order that tortures Moore's angelic character in "Far From Heaven" gets treated like the one that destroys Edith Wharton's Lily Bart or Thomas Hardy's Tess; we all know it's wrongheaded, but it's long gone anyway, and besides, it makes for a helluva story. The fate of Henry James' Isabel Archer, for example, would be far less moving if she could summarily divorce the dreadful man she marries in "The Portrait of a Lady." The stuff of tragedy would devolve into a few hundred dollars in legal fees.

Yet we don't interpret Isabel's story primarily as a protest lodged against the mores of her day, just as we don't cry any less at "King Lear" out of reservations about the monarchy; instead, we consider it a timeless tale of human fallibility and loss. That's because Isabel's world is gone. And by making costume pictures set in the '50s, lingering over the accoutrements of the period as if over the drawing rooms of Brideshead or gleefully romping through glistening and shamelessly bogus "New York street scenes," Haynes and Reed are saying that the '50s, too, are gone. Over. As irretrievable as the drawing rooms of Jane Austen's England and the plantations of Scarlett O'Hara's Georgia. If not everyone in America is ready yet to recognize this, that doesn't make it less final.

In their oddball, covert way, both "Far From Heaven" and "Down With Love" make a more radical assault on the fantasy of the '50s than more overt attacks like "Pleasantville" do. They say to us: We're never going back there. It's not an option. So let's play dress-up because now that is all this will ever be -- a game, a performance, a show, a costume picture. The '50s are finally dead.

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