Below the lovely autumnal colours of the trees surrounding her home, the incredibly well coutured and made-up figure of Cathy Whitaker lives a seemingly perfect life. Her husband Frank is high up and busy in the world of a company making and selling those new television set things (this is the 1950s, of course). Her daughter is a young dancer and has the knack of saying a perfectly decent compliment to her Mummy at the right time. And her son, well, he's just a tiny bit late in helping the home help (with her one, immaculate dress uniform) in with the shopping, but you can't have everything.

Seemingly perfect, yes, but it must be said also busy. Never a day goes by without her or her similar friends having to worry about some aspect of the catering for some function. And then there's this awkward young chap who *will* keep flashing his camera at her, and the attendant journalist for the local Society magazine.

Of course, however, there are problems behind the walls of the house and garden, and within the walls of Frank's office. We see these first, as the morning coffee gets a routine alcoholic addition, and the ashtrays fill up. Frank is snowed under, and taking to the bottle as a filler. But he's also gaining succour in other ways.

We follow him one night from a business dinner. He stands at the back of a cinema auditorium briefly, then finds himself wandering into a bar where the entire clientelle are male. Weird, that...

Of course, depending on which side you look at Frank on his bar-stool, neat whiskey in hand, you can or cannot see his huge wedding band glinting in the lights. The man that engages with Frank with just looks is on the blind-side...

Sooner or later Cathy is having the brainwave to take another getting-cold-on-the-side supper into the office, to make life for Frank a bit happier and easier. But it *would* be a night where Frank's staying late not to work, but to press a man against his desk in passionate embrace, wouldn't it?

Frank must now face reality with his wife, if not with anyone else. This means seeing a doctor who can either recommend talking, electroshock therapy or hormonal rebalancing as cures for his awful problem - with only a small percentage chance of success. He must also try out that brave face at work. Can he do so, or will the walls crumble, and can he actually bear to talk to his wife about the progress he makes in psychiatry?

That might be enough for one film, but Cathy is by far and large the main character. Her story to some extent follows, but from now on they are entwined. Cathy has always had a progressive outlook on the problems of Negroes, as the film's characters permanently call them. She employs two, for a start - that very same home help, and a gardener. We never see him, however, for he has died, only for his son to take over.

Raymond Deagan is a sensitive soul, and rightly so. Having lost his wife, he brings up his daughter alone in troubled times, but he has a gardener's shop, and seems to enjoy whatever work the Whitaker acreage needs doing to it. He and Cathy seem to find talking about things a release for them both.

One day Raymond "has to be getting along" to a supply station himself, and invites Cathy along. This leads from the supplies to an idyllic walk through the autumn forests, and eventually a lunch date at a jazz joint on the edge of town. This would be perfect for Cathy, were it not for the feeling she is in a minority of one - just as Raymond did previously when he went to a modern art gallery showing - and for the fact that a snooty gossiper has seen the two get out of the same truck.

Cathy now has "problems" of her own, as immediately the whole town is flooded with the news she is stepping out with a Negro. And in this day and age, nobody is happy with that - not the Society folk she spends her hours with, and certainly not the coloured community.

* * * * * * *

Far From Heaven is a completely well-made film. The music is just right showing up the melodrama, but in a way that is not over the top. The costume budget must have been huge to get those pinched waists and flouncing skirts *just* so. Indeed the whole look is just perfect, from swooping crane shots to spell-binding intimate conversations a deux. It would have been improved if it were in wide screen, but the films of the 1950s were not exactly commonly in 'Scope, and therein lies the point.

The whole period piece of the film is 100% referential to the domestic sagas of the 1950s. Except they are not. Obviously, in 1950s Connecticut - as throughout the world - there were husbands finding themselves to be homosexual, and other people finding close personal connections to the "wrong" kind of person - everywhere throughout the world, except for in Hollywood product.

There would never be, on the silver screen, any such open suggestion of homosexuality, or of romantic feelings across races. And so Far From Heaven takes it upon itself, in 2002/3, to pretend they still made 1950s-style films in the latter half of the 1960s, which would have been when such subjects were beginning to be revealed in the cinemas. It's what the high-and-mighty media studies idiots would call "post-modern", but let's ignore them and concentrate on the film.

Julianne Moore plays Cathy to perfection. She has one of those faces that might be beautiful, but is forever flawed, and this is just right for the character. Cathy's story is the largest in the film, and is full of ups and downs. One can multiply Moore's performance as a seemingly similar woman in The Hours many-fold for Far From Heaven. One of the performances of the year.

One of the career revivals of the year is to see Dennis Quaid in the role of Frank. Yes, he's been ever-busy, but never in his CV has he put in such a mature, perfectly rounded role, in such a meaty work of art. His stillness and internal anger is very well portrayed.

The role of Raymond is just as important, and in Dennis Haysbert (yes, the President in 24) the film makers have found what surely is one of the next decade's most important coloured actors. Just as Morgan Freeman et al came to the big screen fame "late" in youth-obsessed Hollywood eyes, so Haysbert has matured recently. One might be willing to back-track through his past work to find clues for such a controlled, mannered and totally apt performance - just as he (mostly) gave in 24, were it not full of Major League films, and Waiting to Exhale.

But the prime mention of honours must go to Todd Haynes. Never alive in the 1950s, and responsible previously for Velvet Goldmine (wasn't that a yawn?) and a film about Karen Carpenter "acted" by puppets, he has written and directed a gem of a film with complete confidence, and one that does actually transcend its Hollywood background and become a work of art, full stop.

But how is that so? This is a film that tells you no news, and shows you nothing. As the title of this op suggests, and as its writer thought while watching it, this would very likely *not* be anyone's kind of film.

The answers are very hard to define. What we get are in fact naive characters, from our safe standpoint in the cinema. We know what's going to happen - we've looked the plot up first, and have many years of cinema-going history to base our judgments on. We know what she'll find on the 12th floor of the offices that night she takes Frank supper. We know what people will think of her when they put their own spin on reality with their own prejudices. We've seen through the veneer of her life - just like the B&W parts of Pleasantville, we know it can't last.

The details and script are such a complete mix of 100% correct, and the inaccurate. There are scenes that are set at night and are far too brightly lit - just as the cameras of old couldn't work in true dark. There is a bit of very naff back-projection of grainy stock through a car rear window as Cathy "drives" around, just as you would expect. The lines themselves vary from accuracy to lines written, acted and witnessed from a 50 year remove, where we may either dwell on what irony they focus on, or on how, while they sound naively twee now, they seem perfectly honest to the original 50s films.

What does certainly help our enjoyment is the detail. Just one example - the moment a passer-by sees Raymond's hand on Cathy. The way the whole street just stops...

turns to look...

and slowly returns to life and resumes its business.

Todd Haynes is a homosexual film maker, who can imbue the sense of personalised entrapment of Frank, and the problems others give to Cathy, with his own experience. But this is never an issue. This isn't an "issue" movie as such. It just entertains with its simple story, for those who wish to be entertained.

For those with a friend who will engage in discussion of such matters, you can talk about this film til the cows come home - even though, to repeat, it contains nothing very new.

Far From Heaven does have a message in the entertainment, though. It works on so many levels, as well - while replicating the family-in-crisis melodramas of the 1950s (and the name of Douglas Sirk has been used in particular as reference point - but theediscerning is, like you, too young to have anything to refer to) in complete detail, it also lambasts people who made such films, for being petty, and ignorant of reality, and the way they condemned minority people by pretending such people and their life stories never existed.

But what we also get is a sense that this is how life was lived, such is the level of attention to detail in character, acting and script, and so we also get to loathe, by proxy, the people that did live such way. From happily married couples needing two bedrooms as routine, to Society people talking demeaningly of homosexuals ("well all I'm saying is I don't know any", Cathy's best friend tells her) and people of colour, there is a lot that bears witnessing, and disliking.

But this film, sorry - work of art, does bear witnessing, and will be liked. Even though it *still* isn't your sort of film. A masterpiece.

*** *** ***

The film is a 12A, as the sexual matters never come on screen, apart from that one homosexual kiss. The rating should be a 15 though, for one use of strong language. And it's not when the kid shockingly says "Oh, Jeez!"...