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Far from Heaven
Focus Features


6.8

based on 37 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

based on 75 votes
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FILM:

MPAA 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.

GENRE(S):	Romance
WRITTEN BY:	Todd Haynes
DIRECTED BY:	Todd Haynes
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: April 1, 2003 Video: April 1, 2003 Theatrical: November 8, 2002
RUNNING TIME:	107 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	USA / France

Named Best Picture of 2002 by the New York Film Critics Circle.

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...

100

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.

100

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.

100

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Bold and brilliant.

100

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Easily the best American film so far this year, Far From Heaven is close to perfect.

100

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.

100

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.

100

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.

100

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.

100

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

The movie is, start to finish, candy-colored angst.

100

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.

100

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.

100

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.

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.

Variety David Rooney

An accomplished marriage of elaborate style and content.

Time Richard Schickel

Ironizes without parodying an antique screen manner, then reaches out from beneath this smooth cover to grab us.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

Three sterling performances from Moore, Haysbert and Quaid, all of whom grapple with psychic pain in different, touching ways.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

A supremely intelligent pastiche.

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.

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.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

It feels wholly artificial, and your eyes never tire of drinking it all in.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

A handsome tribute to an era as quaintly distant as tail-fin Chevrolets and A-bomb scares.

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.

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."

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

It's a daring failure that should delight many devotees of Classic Hollywood.

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.

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.

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.

The average user rating for this movie is 6.8 (out of 10) based on 75 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.

Far from Heaven Focus Features

Far from Heaven
Focus Features