In “Far From Heaven,” Moore’s character, Cathy Whitaker, faces a different set of ills. Incorporating elements from Sirk’s “All That Heaven Allows” and “Imitation of Life” — along with references to Max Ophülus’ film about a mother desperate to protect her family, “The Reckless Moment” — the film charts how Cathy’s once picture-perfect life in Hartford, Connecticut, is upended by scandal involving her relationships with two men.
“This was the first and really only film that I wrote for a specific actor in my career,” Haynes said. “Her relationship to the camera — and her understanding of understatement and of eliciting an audience’s investment — that’s always astonished me about her. Not all actors understand that the way she does.
“There were things in Cathy Whitaker that made use of her ability to emote, but also her ability to withdraw and be something that we have to find as a viewer, as we watch her, and that engages you and draws you into the process.”
Opposite Moore, Dennis Quaid plays Cathy’s husband, Frank, and Dennis Haysbert plays Raymond, a local gardener who inherits the Whitakers as clients when his father dies. Early on in the film, Cathy discovers that Frank is sexually attracted to men, which is as much a threat to her social standing as her marriage. And, at the same time, she begins the slow burn of a romance with Raymond — a Black man — that threatens to ruin her completely.
‘You see that painful attempt to fit in’
When Haynes decided to make a film set in 1957, he was acutely aware of the similarities between that era and his own. Like in the Eisenhower years, the beginning of George W. Bush’s presidency was characterized by economic prosperity, even if it was marked by a war in a different way. And, with that, there was a level of complacency toward certain kinds of injustices that was reminiscent of America’s most idealized decade.