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At the
Movies
Pain and Healing
By JOSEPH CUNNEEN
Todd Haynes’ Far From
Heaven is the most critically acclaimed recent U.S. movie but it is not
clear if audiences will respond with equal enthusiasm. The woman I saw it with
said, “No wife should have to suffer like that.” This would seem to
fit in with the director’s intentions since, in addition to recreating the
picture-perfect suburban world of the 1950s, Haynes conceded, “I did want
to make people cry.” My companion added, however, “I was never really
moved.”
“Far from Heaven” is a tribute to ’50s director
Douglas Sirk, well known for a stylized mise en scène and a sense of
irony. Haynes updates Sirk’s 1956 “All That Heaven Allows,” in
which Jane Wyman, a wealthy widow, falls in love with her sensitive gardener
(Rock Hudson) and suffers snide disapproval from her social set. Cathy, the new
heroine (Julianne Moore), becomes emotionally involved with a thoughtful
gardener named Raymond (Dennis Haysbert), a widower who happens to be black.
The melodramatic possibilities of the material are further heightened when the
wife suddenly discovers that her husband Frank (Dennis Quaid) is a
homosexual.
“Far From Heaven” is set in the upper-class world of
1957, and production designer Mark Frieberg has done a brilliant job of getting
all the details accurate and picture-perfect. It’s hard, however, to
believe that everyone was as repressed as they are represented in the
movie’s hothouse atmosphere. Contemporary audiences are encouraged to feel
superior because of the distance traveled since the time of the movie
(Eisenhower is sending troops to integrate a Little Rock, Ark., high school),
but the exaggerated reactions of neighbors when they see an interracial couple
in eager conversation would be more appropriate in farce. Haynes is content to
rework old Hollywood formulas without irony, and the empty exchanges between
Cathy and Raymond are emotionally heightened by Elmer Bernstein’s
overwrought score.
Moore is nevertheless being mentioned as a contender for Oscar
honors. Her Cathy certainly projects a credible image of what used to be
considered the perfect wife, presiding over an immaculate split-level home --
aided by a black maid, gently controlling her two children, and always
handsomely dressed and coiffed. With Frank, successful husband who is sales
manager for Magna-tech (a TV manufacturer), she is constantly posing for photos
in the local newspaper and appearing at appropriate social functions. Indeed,
it is at a local art show that her conversation with Raymond, in which he
explains the significance of a painting by Miró, begins to generate
public curiosity.
The artificiality of “Far From Heaven” is evident in the
thoughtful serenity of Raymond’s manner; he is even given an 11-year-old
daughter, who becomes a victim of stone-throwing young white thugs. Raymond
finds Cathy in tears after she learns, through a melodramatic scene at
Frank’s Magnatech office, that her husband is gay. Later, when Raymond
takes her for a drive to give her a chance to relax, they are recognized by one
of Cathy’s easily shocked neighbors.
Haynes would have had a stronger movie if he had given equal
attention to Frank’s situation; Quaid is merely allowed to scowl and
mutter unconvincingly, “We’re going to beat this problem.” But
this would have been to let too much reality intrude on the film’s
emphasis of pathos and control. Haynes has said that he hoped to make a movie
“you could take your grandmother to.” He has certainly employed
considerable intelligence to control the shimmering surfaces of “Far From
Heaven” in exactly the way he wanted. My gut reaction, however, is: Why
bother?
Atom Egoyan’s Ararat is
a far more ambitious film, linking the theme of memory with the Armenian
genocide of 1915 as narrative. Unfortunately, its extremely complex structure
is hard to keep under control; although a thoughtful movie, it is uneven and
often confusing.
Egoyan, a Canadian director with an international reputation
(“The Sweet Hereafter”), realizes that films distort the reality they
pretend to present. Born in Egypt to Armenian parents, he is very aware that
Turkey still denies culpability in the slaughter of more than a million
Armenians during World War I, but chooses to present the tragedy through the
making of a film within his film. There are moments of compelling horror, like
the scene in which young women are forced to dance, then doused with kerosene
and burned alive, but at other times the camera draws back, abruptly reminding
us that everything has been staged for our “entertainment.”
Most of the historical material is based on Clarence Ussher’s
1917 memoir, An American Physician in Turkey, and concerns the siege of
the city of Van. But this authenticity is compromised by the commercially
motivated decision to invent the story that, as an 11-year old boy, the famous
Armenian painter Arshile Gorky, who grew up in the area, was sent by the
besieged community to solicit American intervention. Ani (Arsinée
Khanjian), an expert on Gorky, was hired by the director of the
film-within-the-film (Charles Aznavour) as an adviser, but her real value to
“Ararat” is to call attention to the painter’s work, especially
his “Portrait of the Artist and His Mother,” completed in the United
States in 1936.
Present-day family complications threaten to overwhelm the
material because Ani’s son, Raffi (David Alpay), is having an affair with
his stepsister, Celia (Marie-Josée Croze), who holds his mother
responsible for her father’s murder or suicide. When Raffi, whose own
father had been killed while trying to assassinate a Turkish diplomat, is
stopped at the airport by a customs officer (Christopher Plummer), the
convoluted plotting reaches a climax. Raffi has come back with a video diary of
his secret trip to Turkey, but the customs officer understandably suspects that
heroin is hidden in the several cans of film the young man is bringing into the
country. The scene is too long and talky, but Raffi’s frenzied effort to
explain the event that motivated his search ultimately helps to heal the custom
officer’s conflict with his own son.
All this is too much to digest in a single viewing, and it is easy
to say that “Ararat” ultimately doesn’t “work.” But
the movie forces us to reflect on the importance of remembrance, and by the end
Gorky’s “Portrait of the Artist and His Mother” has become a
healing image for Armenian identity and our own most painful memories.
El Crimen del Padre Amaro
deserves attention as the most successful Mexican-made movie in history, and
the official Mexican entry for best foreign language film at next spring’s
Academy awards. Catholic authorities and government officials lobbied to get it
banned, a factor the producers were able to use to sell more tickets. The
handsome young star of “Y Tu Mama Tambien” (Gael García
Bernal) plays Fr. Amaro, whose most exploitable “crime” is having an
affair with Amelia (Ana Claudia Talancón), a pretty 16-year-old
catechism teacher in Los Reyes, the rural village to which he is assigned.
“Padre Amaro” was updated from a novel by the highly
esteemed 19th century Portuguese novelist, José Maria Eça de
Queiróz. The novel may well be subtler than the movie, which is
forthright in maintaining that the church is repressive and the clergy have a
soft life. The one exception is Fr. Natalio (Damián Alcázar), who
serves in a remote mountainous area and talks to his fellow priests about
liberation theology. Fr. Amaro seems to admire Fr. Natalio, but as a favorite
of the bishop who is grooming him for clerical advancement, has no intention of
imitating him.
The pastor of Los Reyes, Fr. Benito -- himself involved in a
longtime affair with his housekeeper, Sanjuanera (Angélica
Aragón), Amelia’s mother -- accepts cash from a local drug lord to
build a hospital in the area. But the film’s strongest contempt is
directed at the self-satisfied bishop (Ernesto Gómez Cruz), who
instructs Fr. Amaro to pass on a note to Fr. Natalio informing him that he has
been excommunicated.
At a clergy meeting Fr. Amaro speaks in favor of making clerical
celibacy optional, but the pastor dismisses the suggestion as far-fetched:
“It’s easier to think of making a Mexican pope than of abandoning
celibacy.”
One can understand why Mexican audiences would find the line
hilarious, but hard to sympathize with Fr. Amaro’s careful planning of his
tryst with Amelia in a shack inhabited by the mentally handicapped daughter of
one of Fr. Benito’s assistants. The love scene is even accompanied by
recitation of appropriate lines from the Song of Songs, and later Fr. Amaro
expresses his devotion by dressing Amelia in the blue satin cloak of the
Blessed Virgin.
Director Carlos Carrera may have been hoping to compete with the
late Juan Luis Buñuel by including such bizarre details as having an old
crone steal Communion wafers to feed them to her cat, but Buñuel’s
anti-clericalism, as in “Nazarin,” is more powerful and complex, and
expressed in esthetic terms. “Padre Amaro” has little real connection
with the present sexual scandal in the church, but may please some viewers by
its reminders of the misuse of clerical power. It would be a stronger movie,
however, if its central character were more complex, and his fall from grace
seen as the surrender of a genuine ideal.
Joseph Cunneen is NCR’s regular movie reviewer. His
e-mail address is Scunn24219@aol.com
National Catholic Reporter, November 29,
2002
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