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Todd Haynes’ latest film takes place in dreamy 1950s Connecticut, a world of well-tended lawns and spacious, leaf-dappled avenues. In terms of production design, Far From Heaven is all-out perfection, with its Rockwellian portrait of postwar America, flush with the hues of New England’s seasons and the proud veneer of American prosperity.

Haynes styles Far From Heaven after the campy, high-gloss tearjerkers of Douglas Sirk. With its striking color tones, canted close-ups and beautifully lush score, he craftily pays tribute to that master of 50s-era melodrama.

Cathy Whittaker (Julianne Moore) is, by all appearances, a perfect wife to Frank (Dennis Quaid), her successful, charming husband and a perfect mother to two well-bred children. Living in their tidy, well-burnished home, the Whitakers are emblematic of pure “Ozzie & Harriet” Americana.

Once Haynes shatters that veneer, however, hidden truths and desires come pouring out. After a late-night contretemps in Frank’s office, he admits to Cathy his homosexuality and plods off to a psychiatrist to “cure” himself. With her marriage now adrift, Cathy finds herself emotionally drawn to Raymond (Dennis Haysbert), a black gardener.

Cathy’s indiscrete friendship with Raymond arouses outrage among her town’s self-righteous gossip-mongers, while Frank struggles to come to terms with his sexual crisis. In effect, Haynes gives conservative America a double dose of anathema: interracial love and homosexuality. Fortunately, he explores his themes with enough humor and visual flair to keep from descending into heavygoing drama.

The heart of this film is Julianne Moore, marvelously scaling that range from silly, Sirkian camp to nuanced, genuinely-earned pathos. Moore perfectly pitches her performance, seamlessly going from gently satiric to deeply affecting, as Cathy transitions from the carefree homemaker and society darling to the abandoned woman and society cast-off.

Moore is well-matched with Dennis Haysbert whose Raymond projects an easy, composed charm and the dignity of a man trying to make a decent living while hemmed in by the expectations of not just whites but the blacks in his own community. Their scenes have a quiet, revealing eloquence.

The one false note comes from Dennis Quaid. One senses a tentative, halting quality in his performance, and, in conveying his inner pain, Quaid settles for a glowering, grunting presence, constipated with shame, lust or too much whiskey.

To be fair, Haynes’ script underdevelops Frank’s character. Indeed, every opportunity for Quaid to mine his character for deeper layers falters simply for lack of material. A scene in which Frank makes a startling confession to Cathy begins brilliantly, but eventually peters out with Quaid sobbing and yammering, and the scene dies in his hands soon afterwards.

Far From Heaven’s campy stylistic framework can’t accommodate the weighty, poignant truths that must be expressed between the estranged and the heartbroken to allow for a satisfying resolution. Instead, we conclude with a series of half-baked scenes that dramatically fall apart and a style that clashes with the richness and sincerity of Moore’s performance. Still, Haynes’ revisionist melodrama is a barbed and funny enough social satire, so visually ripe and with such a commanding showcase for Moore, that it manages to be an affecting experience.

Grade: B

Written/Directed by: Todd Haynes
Cast: Julianne Moore, Dennis Quaid, Dennis Haysbert, Patricia Clarkson, Viola Davis, Celia Weston, Michael Gaston

New Orleans, the setting of writer-director Shainee Gabel’s debut feature, “A Love for Bobby Long,” an adaptation of a Rupert Everett Capps novel, plays as powerful a role as its three principals do. Indeed, “Love Song” is awash in the lonesome, gorgeous compositions by cinematographer Elliot Davis of the city’s lush riverbank and its streets bordered by mullioned arcades. No other American city so charmingly exudes the notion of forlorn dreams as New Orleans, and in setting out to make a movie about marginal, broken-down lives, Gabel understood this perhaps better than the story she wants to tell. Apart from Davis’ painterly work and Gabel’s irresistible use of regional rock and blues, the rest of “Love Song” is told in broad strokes rather than unique shades.

We first see unschooled, creamy-legged Pursy Will (Scarlett Johansson) in hot pants flipping TV channels and licking crunchy peanut butter off a spoon in the rundown trailer that she shares with her white-trash jerk of a husband. Pursy has no memory of her mother, Lorraine, but, upon learning of her death, she escapes to New Orleans to claim the house Lorraine left to her. She finds the place already occupied by a pair of typically grizzled misfits. One of them, Bobby Long (John Travolta), a curmudgeonly drunk and erstwhile literature professor, often rhapsodizes about Lorraine, a one-time singing sensation. The other, Lawson Pines (Gabriel Macht), Bobby’s protégé and a would-be writer, is struggling to finish his first novel in his own booze-induced haze.

The trio’s dynamic of domestic squabbling and personality conflicts feels straight out of some made-for-TV soaper, lacking in tension, never stirring up its undercurrents for palpable drama to erupt. Gabel’s script may be well-meaning but her storytelling treads familiar territory as Pursy, Bobby and Lawson learn to shuck off the guilt and shame of their conjoined pasts and, in the lovely glow of redemption, ready themselves for the next chapters in their lives. Gabel has potentially challenging material on her hands but her treatment of it feels too hygienic, mistaking tastefulness for subtlety.

Rather than bore into its characters for something truly distinctive, “Love Song” lingers on the surfaces of jokes, yarns or exchanges that hardly pass for revelation. It amounts to a character study that trades in stereotypes of Southern gothic, little more. Johansson sticks to the saturnine mugging that’s made her so popular and Travolta, while not bad in
the role, feels miscast. The effect of Travolta–one of our most recognizable movie stars–playing a low-life literary boozehound is like that proverbial bull tearing up the china shop. That leaves the lesser-known Gabriel Macht to pick up the slack, and he does a fine job. The actor never champs at the material, never fretting to wring more from Gabel’s bland material than it can provide, conveying more in the slightest shift of expression than either Travolta, in all his ham-fisted straining, or Johansson, in all her glacial preening, can manage.

Gabel aspires to poetry but lacks the storytelling chops to reap it from her milieu. Still, with its closely-felt sounds and images, “Love Song” is an evocative picture-postcard paean to its setting. That, together with its likeable–albeit shallow–characters, makes this a pleasant enough excursion into the bayou.

Grade: C+

Written/Directed by: Shainee Gabel
Cast: John Travolta, Scarlett Johansson, Gabriel Macht, Deborah Kara Unger

In “21 Grams,” Jack, a born-again ex-con with a die-hard Jesus obsession, reprimands his son for hitting his sister. He tells him hitting is not tolerated in their house. To drive his point home, he smacks the boy across the head. Then, just as straight-faced, he goes back to his meal, and the movie assiduously plows ahead, without pausing to breathe in the fresh air of irony. That Jack does not see the hypocrisy of his ways makes for a “ha-ha” moment, but it also points to one of the most irritating qualities about “21 Grams”—not that its characters are morally and emotionally stunted, but that it limits its scope and vision to their distorted, simplistic points-of-view.

Director Alejandro González Iñárritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga, following up their deservedly praised “Amores Perros,” portray three criss-crossing lives, each stricken with loss, guilt or grief and each drifting about in a pall of self-pity. “21 Grams” is a love story and a revenge story in one, steeped in a palette of dour, desaturated tones, courtesy of Rodrigo Prieto’s arresting cinematography. Iñárritu and Arriaga fashion their movie like a jigsaw puzzle, its events taken out of time and reconfigured from multiple perspectives, taking shape not so much organically as like a complex algebraic equation.

Paul (Sean Penn), a married, chain-smoking mathematician, is dying from a heart ailment. He receives a new heart donated by a widow whose husband died in a car accident. The widow, Christina (Naomi Watts), grieves intensely, even reverting to her old drug habit. Paul tracks Christina down, as a way to close the chapter on his illness, but the two wind up falling in love. Paul’s affair prompts him to end his ailing marriage as he becomes more deeply entangled in Christina’s grief. She wants revenge against Jack (Benecio Del Toro), the driver who caused the accident and who has plunged himself into a conundrum of guilt and religious doubt. Jack’s faith in God is founded on desperation, even bitterness, as he has struggled to clean up his act and keep his family together.

Among the leads, Del Toro, modulating the tortured Jack with his usual understated bravado, comes off best. Watts has several punchy dramatic scenes but, in Iñárritu’s hands, they come off as over-wrought, full of hellfire but lacking in grace or subtlety. Penn reduces Paul to a schtick of lugubrious mumbles and tantrums, grateful for his new lease on life but for the cigarettes he chokes on with every wheezing breath.

Bafflingly selfish and self-destructive people like this do exist, but it’s the job of a good storyteller to bring us closer to an understanding of such characters, to bridge the gap between them and an audience wishing to connect with them. But Iñárritu and Arriaga seem more swept away by their formal gimmickry, and the full power of their movie’s emotional potential is scattered in the fragmentation. Their movie thrashes about wildly, grabbing us by the collar and exhorting us to feel something. Apart from the fleeting satisfaction of its structural parlor game, I felt little else in “21 Grams” save exhausted boredom. Since when was love such a major drag?

Grade: C-

Directed by: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Written by: Guillermo Arriaga
Cast: Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro, Naomi Watts, Danny Huston, Charlotte Gainsbourg, John Rubinstein, Eddie Marsan