Set in Hartford, Connecticut, Moore plays Cathy Whitaker, a picture-perfect image of the ideal housewife. She is always beaming, drives a stationwagon, takes good care of her husband and kids, cooks meals, and has regular visits with her girlfriends about the latest gossip and carpet color-matching schemes. Her husband, Frank Whitaker (Dennis Quaid), is a workaholic sales executive. Their image is so picture-perfect that she is constantly photographed in her home or in other whereabouts like an art gallery. Indeed this whole word seems too fabricated to really believe, and we are right to have those assumptions.

Just like when nothing seems wrong at the surface, we slowly uncover Frank's secrets. At the start of the film, Frank is arrested by the police for drunk and disorderly conduct. Cathy's party proves a bust since she has to pick up him at the station. But Frank has more up his sleeve when he is discovered kissing another man at work by Cathy. He is a closeted homosexual and convinces his wife that he will seek help to "beat this thing." The homosexuality is a threat to their marriage, not necessarily to the unaware community.

Curiously, the homosexuality awakens Cathy to other things. Sure, she has her clique of friends including her gabby best friend, Eleanor (Patricia Clarkson), but something is missing. When Cathy finds that she has a new gardener, Raymond (Dennis Haysbert), she also finds a friend who can really listen to her. The problem is that Raymond is black and this is the 1950's, long before the civil-rights movement. Cathy and Raymond become friendly, attend the same galleries and eat at a restaurant that only blacks frequent. Never mind that Cathy is absent-minded and fully supports the NAACP, the community looks down at her as does her husband. In other words, homosexuality is kept in the closet but racial, non-romantic relations are best left unseen or else you will be shunned. That kind of hipocrisy has never really been addressed before, and I imagine that it has more to do with the expected roles of men and women in society.

"Far From Heaven" is directed by Todd Haynes who previously worked with Moore in "Safe." Haynes has crafted a style for the film to assume the look of a movie from the 1950's. Curiously, it is not just the filmic style, which incorporates the use of dissolves as continuity from one scene to the next, as well as the Technicolor look of those 50's melodramas by director Douglas Sirk with those high-angle crane shots of leaves in the foreground as we descend upon a familiar sight - a big house with a white-picket fence. And it is not just the syrupy, impactful music by Elmer Bernstein, himself a product of those times with his memorable scores. The acting and dialogue style seems to come from the way Hollywood movies used to depict those times. In other words, leaving aside the taboos of race and sexual identity, "Far From Heaven" looks exactly like a film from the 1950's that has only recently surfaced. The reason for this postmodernist "Pleasantville"-style may be to dig up the repressed feelings that were inherent in the Hollywood films of the 50's, and serve them straight up. For example, race and sexual orientation were barely ever discussed in those films (the same could hold true of society back then). Thus Haynes finds a way of articulating those reserved emotions and getting them literally out of the closet. For example, "ah, geez" is a term you might have heard in some of those films, but certainly the F-word was never uttered in a Hollywood film until 1970's "MASH." When Frank angrily spews the word, it feels like a sudden shock of reality since we didn't expect to hear it.

The movie never aims to be parody but its mannered, stylistic speech could easily have led in that direction. That is why it is hard to know how to respond to Julianne Moore's performance, which is pitch-perfect in its honing of such delicate, refined dialogue. The dialogue is not sparkling or poetic yet it is unironic and well-suited to the time and place it evokes. It can induce laughter in the audience, such as when Cathy admits to Raymond at the gallery that she is not prejudiced and supports the NAACP. Again, what can induce laughter is the very notion that we have been fooled into thinking we are watching a movie from the 1950's, thus her comments seem shocking. Another noteworthy scene is when Frank enters a bar for homosexuals, and they look at him with humiliation. This scene seems directly lifted from a similar moment in 1962's "Advise and Consent" where Don Murray looked suitably humiliated to be in a club for gays.

"Far From Heaven" is a film buff's dream, a stylistic stretch of the imagination of a decade that is rarely discussed much anymore. Not only is it a walk back into the past, it is like Douglas Sirk literally came back from the dead and made a movie in the same style of his cult films. More significantly, it is about the possibility of change and of trying to break through the facade by being yourself. Cathy does change but does not try to change for others. Her friends shun her but the most heartbreaking scene is when she tells the ousted Raymond she will visit him in Baltimore. His response is that it is not a good idea. What Moore and Haynes have done has not really been done before - to recreate a cinematic past and uncover what was hidden. This is a marvelous film that grows on you long after the credits.