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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Conservatives want America to return to the Doris Day era. But as the films "Far From Heaven" and "Down With Love" prove, those days are so gone, the only thing left to do is make costume dramas about them.
May 28, 2003 | Few recent movies have had such wildly different effects on their audiences as "Far From Heaven" and "Down With Love." Most people either loathed or adored Todd Haynes' reverent recreation of the glossy melodramas of the 1950s. I've heard filmgoers rave about Peyton Reed's pop homage to Doris Day's early '60s sex comedies, and others say they walked out in disgust. And some people are simply baffled by both. "But what exactly is it trying to say about the '50s?" a friend of mine wailed in the middle of a conversation about "Far From Heaven," complaining that it left him cold. "It would have been better if the characters had been even remotely believable," said another friend of the same film.
Of course, neither film is meant to be believable; they're exercises in cinematic technique, tributes to types of movies that no doubt seemed a bit implausible back in the era when they were made. And yet even the much lighter and less subtle "Down With Love" is about more than just pillbox hats and process shots; there's a whiff of yearning behind the spoofery, but only a fool would write it off to nostalgia or a wish to return to simpler times. You couldn't call these movies parodies, really, but it's hard to accept them as sincere either.
Both "Far From Heaven" and "Down With Love" seem, well, weird. You could blame that on their being so highly stylized, but when was the last time anyone found the artificiality of "The Importance of Being Earnest" unsettling? Or, for that matter, the ritualized theatrics of "Throne of Blood"? We can easily accept that none of the characters in Oscar Wilde's play or Akira Kurosawa's fusion of "Macbeth" with Japanese Kabuki act like anyone we've ever met, because the worlds they inhabit are so remote. Audiences buy piles of tickets to Merchant-Ivory movies and don't walk out fretting because they can't figure out what the filmmakers are trying to say about Victorian society. The problem seems to be that we aren't ready to put mid-20th-century America in the same category.
What makes these two movies aesthetic flash points is that they're about the '50s. (OK, "Down With Love" is set in 1962, but pointedly before the Kennedy assassination, the arrival of the Beatles, and perhaps more significantly given the movie's preoccupation with the battle of the sexes, the publication of Betty Friedan's "Feminine Mystique." The movies Reed is riffing on belong to a world that's decidedly pre-counterculture, the '50s in their hearts if not by their calendars.) And, as my friends' confusion suggests, we're still supposed to have something to say about the '50s. Or at least, some of us think we are, and that is exactly what makes the response to "Far From Heaven" and "Down With Love" so divided.
At heart, these two movies are costume pictures. Back when the costume picture was invented, it was the kind of movie in which, as one Hollywood producer put it, "the guys write with feathers." Costume pictures are eye candy, a visual feast of great outfits and alluringly lavish interiors -- or, in the case of "Far From Heaven," exteriors; were any actual autumn leaves ever so ravishing as the ones that set off Julianne Moore's auburn hair? The people in these movies don't behave or talk the way we do. Moore's character, a housewife at ease with her life except for her husband's sexually rooted detachment, scolds her kids for using language that doesn't even rate as cussing today. Out on the town in "Down With Love," Renée Zellweger and Ewan McGregor pose in front of a backdrop of neon nightclub signs and Manhattan street scenes, pretending to be taking in the sights.
In his endlessly delightful book "American Scenarios," film scholar Joseph Reed asks about costume pictures, "Why are they for us a kind of indulgence? Is it because they offer us the chance to be (even more than most movies do) innocent bystanders, offer a way of watching life-and-death moral and social actions, while remaining innocent of involvement ... They allow us to ... twitch a cape and thump a riding crop without responsibility for the great matters at hand on the screen."
At the time that, say, Douglas Sirk's "Magnificent Obsession" or Michael Gordon's "Pillow Talk" came out, filmmakers knew they weren't faithfully reproducing the world they lived in, but they surely didn't think their movies were entirely cut off from reality, either. The romantic travails and bourgeois aspirations of Sirk's characters touched on the dreams of their audiences, and if women in the 1950s were rarely as virginal as Doris Day, many of them thought they should be, or should at least appear to be. Both directors exaggerated (one for the sake of melodrama and the other for comedy) the social concerns and mores of their day, but they weren't making fantasy films, not, that is, making costume pictures.
