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Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
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Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
Far from Heaven
Universal acclaim
Based on 37 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 76 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Romance
Written by: Todd Haynes
Directed by: Todd Haynes
Release Date:
Theatrical: November 8, 2002
DVD: April 1, 2003
Running Time: 107 minutes, Color
Origin: USA / France
Summary
RATING: PG-13 for mature thematic elements, sexual content, brief violence and language
Starring Julianne Moore, Dennis Quaid, Dennis Haysbert, Patricia Clarkson, Viola Davis, James Rebhorn, Bette Henritze, and Michael Gaston
An idyllic 1950s married couple faces social taboos of homosexuality and interracial relationships -- but at great cost.
Also On Metacritic
FILM: I'm Not There Velvet Goldmine
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Boston Globe Wesley Morris
This is a love letter from one auteur to another that doesn't feel like a term paper. Instead, Far From Heaven is an honest-to-God drama with resonance all its own.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir
A movie for hardcore film geeks and regular folk alike, a stunning, and stunningly improbable, fusion of postmodern pastiche and old-school Hollywood melodrama. It's both a marvelous technical accomplishment and a tragic love story that sweeps you off your feet.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt
Easily the best American film so far this year, Far From Heaven is close to perfect.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington
There's an incongruous but ravishing beauty in Far From Heaven, and in its three excellent central performances, that counteracts the seeming kitschiness of the story.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
Julianne Moore, Dennis Quaid and Dennis Haysbert are called on to play characters whose instincts are wholly different from their own. By succeeding, they make their characters real, instead of stereotypes.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Dana Stevens
It rediscovers the aching, desiring humanity in a genre -- and a period-- too often subjected to easy parody or ironic appropriation. In a word, it's divine.
Read Full Review >New York Post Lou Lumenick
Perhaps the year's most daring and fully realized movie, is a pitch-perfect re-creation of '50s melodramas, showcasing a four-hankie performance by a peroxided Julianne Moore.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
The movie is, start to finish, candy-colored angst.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Manohla Dargis
The film's three leads are extraordinary, but what Moore does with her role is so beyond the parameters of what we call great acting that it nearly defies categorization.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
This brilliantly and comprehensively captures the look, feel, and sound of glamorous 50s tearjerkers like All That Heaven Allows, not to mock or feel superior to them but to say new things with their vocabulary.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
Far From Heaven would have been one of the great American films of the '50s; it is certainly the finest American melodrama of our time.
The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps
Haynes makes it possible to forget all the layers at work and simply be swept up in the story's emotions. As in Sirk's films, these characters live and breathe within the film's exaggerated reality, thanks to rich performances by Haysbert, Quaid, and especially Moore.
Read Full Review >Newsweek David Ansen
Moore’s stunning, subtle performance as a woman trapped in the conventions of her time encapsulates the film’s brave, double-edged beauty.
Time Richard Schickel
Ironizes without parodying an antique screen manner, then reaches out from beneath this smooth cover to grab us.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Desson Thomson
Three sterling performances from Moore, Haysbert and Quaid, all of whom grapple with psychic pain in different, touching ways.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Ella Taylor
Not a campy movie. True, it has its ironies, but though you can read it ironically if you wish, Haynes' triumph is that it also plays beautifully straight.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten
Haynes brings the emotional underbelly to the surface, he also tricks up the visual surface with elaborate color schemes that provide unspoken clues regarding the characters’ frames of mind.
New York Daily News Jack Mathews
May be the year's most derivative film, but it's also the most original.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
It feels wholly artificial, and your eyes never tire of drinking it all in.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
Begins almost as a nostalgic excursion, but quickly detours into a powerful and telling story that examines forbidden love, racial tension, and other issues that are as valid today as they were in the 1950s.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine Peter Rainer
It elevates female sacrifice into an aesthetic. The movie isn't about suffering, really. It's about how you look when you suffer, how you dress up for it. Style is all.
Read Full Review >The New Yorker Anthony Lane
In short, Haynes is so smart, tolerant, and thoughtful that he has to be saved by his actors. Julianne Moore takes this picture further, perhaps, than anyone can have dreamed. [18 November 2002, p. 104]
TV Guide Ken Fox
Haynes took an enormous risk here, but thanks to his thoughtful script and an utterly sincere performance from Moore, what could have easily become a cold, calculated exercise in postmodern pastiche winds up a powerful and deeply moving example of melodramatic moviemaking.
Read Full Review >USA Today Mike Clark
Glossy or not, the movie is unflinchingly tough-minded, down to its Hollywood-weepy ending, which, if you think about it, may be the year's gloomiest.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
If it's ultimately a failure -- and I think it is -- it's still worth seeing, because it's the most ambitious and magnificent failure in recent memory. That, in a sense, qualifies it as a certain kind of "good movie."
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey
For all its accomplishments, Far from Heaven remains hermetic, an elegant exercise in deadpan irony. What does the movie ultimately mean? Art, we're told, should not mean, but be -- but Haynes's cinematic essays are designed to provoke commentary.
Read Full Review >Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman
A handsome tribute to an era as quaintly distant as tail-fin Chevrolets and A-bomb scares.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Tim Merrill
Once again, though -- almost in spite of Haynes' rigorous post-ironic efforts to bring Sirk back from the dead in any and every way he can -- it ultimately comes down to Moore -- and Moore is simply...wonderful.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
Yet dramatic energy is in short supply. The actors move about this elaborate movie museum in a modified dream state, as if living in the present while rooted in the past. But the strategy doesn't work. It's an imitation of lifelessness.
Dallas Observer Jean Oppenheimer
When all is said and done, Far from Heaven proves an easier film to appreciate than to emotionally embrace. It fails the test of being, in the descriptive phrase of Pauline Kael, "compulsively watchable."
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
It's a daring failure that should delight many devotees of Classic Hollywood.
Read Full Review >The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann
Even with its latter-day (modified) frankness, Far From Heaven is only thin glamour that lacks a tacit wry base. Thus diminished, it can be tagged with a term that Susan Sontag once defined so well that she put it out of circulation: camp.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
It's the oddest case yet of the Emperor's New Clothes. After all, the Emperor in the fairy tale was naked. This movie has tons of fabulous clothing. The people disappear within their wardrobes.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Stephen Hunter
The movie has the sense of being embalmed, or pickled. With its stilted dialogue not quite kitschy enough to be funny and not quite authentic enough to be realistic, the whole movie feels as if it's taking place in formaldehyde.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 6.8 (out of 10) based on 76 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Eric L gave it an8:
This film is very difficult to score - I do agree with one reviewer who found it very unlikely that Dennis Quaid's character would just dump Cathy and live with a man - because he definitely would lose his job and everything - in that era men did those things on the side while still being married. However, I admire very much what was attempted in this movie, and for the most part they succeeded. Julienne Moore is absolutely brilliant, and the reason she did not win the oscar is because the idiots in Hollywood always overlook understated performances - and yet these performances are actually more difficult (See Mary Tyler Moore in "Ordinary People"). Moore is perfect in every scene as she watches her perfect wold unravel and struggles between the part of herself that wants to scream outloud, and the other part of her that has been perfectly honed over the years to be the ideal suburban upscale wife - it is a subtle and brilliant performance. The script is not perfect, and there were a few minor scenes that did not ring true- but the overall package is amazing - the perfect cast from top to bottom, most of the script, the acting, cinematography, directing, score, everything about this movies pays homage to a by-gone era of American Films and does it with taste and class. When thinking about the 50's you have to remember that the 50's (as any decade) varied depending on where you lived and how you were raised - and this movie comes pretty close to what real life was like for these people - they were literally trapped inside a nightmare which they (and their contemporaries) had created - it's no wonder that a few years later their children would be burning their bras and protesting wars. Far from Heaven is indeed a great movie because it has such high aspirations - a movie from 2002 that dares to style itself after a 50's drama and to do so via (gasp) a subtle script rather than relying on special effects and things blowing up etc. For the most part they achieved their goal and are to be commended for their efforts. This is a beautiful film worth watching if only to appreciate the efforts of all involved.
Kurt K. gave it a9:
Stunningly beautiful scenery and lead actress, powerful scenes by Dennis Quaid. The best of its type I've ever seen.
Allison R. gave it a4:
Predictable movie. lacked focus while trying to tackle two huge themes (homosexuality & racism) at the same time... Didn't enjoy the acting in this movie, extremely sterile and contrived. Anybody else notice the boeing jet fly by on the reflection in the woman's car, while she was watching them go into the black resturant? Can't believe that made the cut!
Larry M. gave it a9:
A great film.
J. Ryan G. gave it a9:
If Luis Bunuel's "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" is a brilliant work of art made out of a concise political statement, this film is a keen political statement made about other works of art. It's beautifully shot, highlighted by Elmer Bernstein's appropriately melodramatic score, and held together by Julianne Moore's bravest performance. Kudos also to an unusually real Dennis Quaid, who was robbed of an Oscar nomination. He provides the jagged edge to an otherwise beautiful and elegant piece, where harsh truths and ugly sensations smolder beneath the surface. Perhaps its politics are most poignant and effective when showing how certain things are said in today's society that might've remained as code in the 1950s, yet we're still all too willing to misrepresent them in their finest pomp and polish. I'm not entirely sure that that statement is something the director, who is openly gay, intended to say.
Andrew W. gave it a10:
Every scene is perfect.
Matt D. gave it a 9:
Haynes's characters ultimately respect the moral sensibilites of the era, which gives the film weight.
