Far From Heaven: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

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Amazon.com

With typical verve, director Todd Haynes’s film not only seeks to evoke Douglas Sirk’s social-themed Hollywood melodramas of the ‘50s, but to bring an entirely new one to life with a distinct lack of modern irony. In telling the story of a Connecticut couple whose “perfect” relationship masks taboo undercurrents of homosexuality and interracial love, Haynes has found the perfect musical collaborator in 50-plus-year film scoring veteran Elmer Bernstein. The composer manages a deft tightrope act here, managing to inform Haynes’s film-out-of-time with the same delicate, emotionally compelling sensibility he brought to his classic score for To Kill a Mockingbird, while steering clear of emotional treacle and obvious musical anachronisms. Anchored by a spare, ethereal piano theme (performed with sympathetic grace by Cynthia Millar) and colored with melancholy woodwind figures and restrained string flourishes, Bernstein’s music still manages a back-to-the-future pastoralism that firmly underscores the film’s timeless subtexts. It’s a masterpiece of autumnal understatement by one of Hollywood’s true living legends. —Jerry McCulley

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Far From Heaven

Todd Haynes

This uniquely beautiful film—from one of the smartest and most idiosyncratic of contemporary directors, Todd Haynes (Safe, Velvet Goldmine)—takes the lush 1950s visual style of so-called women’s pictures (particularly those of Douglas Sirk, director of Imitation of Life and Magnificent Obsession) to tell a story that mixes both sexual and racial prejudice. Julianne Moore, an amazing fusion of vulnerability and will power, plays a housewife whose husband (Dennis Quaid) has a secret gay life. When she finds solace in the company of a…

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