Mildred Pierce (episodes 4-5)

episodes 1-2 | episode 3 | episodes 4-5

In the final two episodes of Todd Haynes' HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce, the story leaps forward in time several years after the previous episode ended with a decisive break between Mildred (Kate Winslet) and her high society lover Monty Beragon (Guy Pearce). In the ensuing years, Mildred's business has flourished and expanded, and she now has two additional restaurants as a part of her empire, run by her friends. Mildred's daughter Veda has grown up, too, a detail that Haynes lovingly lingers over during the early scene where Mildred returns home to find Veda playing the piano in the living room. The girl is only seen from behind at first, as Haynes' camera glides through the house, following Mildred as she putters about, the images recalling the scenes from earlier episodes of Veda practicing her piano. But this is not the snotty little brat of the first three parts of the series, this is Veda all grown up into a predatory diva, played by Evan Rachel Wood. And just as she was as a child, Veda is still the center of Mildred's life, the whole reason for her existence. Throughout these often devastating, potent final two and a half hours of the miniseries, Veda's dominance of Mildred's life becomes the focus of the film as well, and in the process it begins to seem like Haynes is critiquing the foundations of motherhood itself.

Mildred's story, after all, is the story of the costs of motherhood. Again and again, Mildred sacrifices everything for Veda. At a certain point, after a tremendous argument, Veda moves out of her mother's home, and Mildred spends the rest of her time trying to get her daughter back, trying to win the affection of this girl who is very appropriately compared to a rare and beautiful — but deadly — snake. Mildred allows her business to flounder, her attention wavering from her previous single-minded dedication to having a prosperous career. The whole reason for her business in the first place was to impress Veda, to be able to provide for Veda, and with Veda gone Mildred no longer seems like the strong, determined businesswoman that she once was.

Mildred also gets back together with Monty after randomly encountering him on a street corner, waiting for a bus — he's "between cars," he says, maintaining his high society composure even now that his fortunes have fallen even further. Their relationship initially seems like an improved version of their original fling. The passion is there, and Mildred's desire for Monty is reawakened once she's back in his presence. There's real if unlikely chemistry between them, and Haynes uses it as an opportunity for another very lurid sex scene: it's not often that one sees a shot of a man's head buried between a woman's legs in a staid period picture. The couple gets married, and Monty seems to have changed in substantial ways from his earlier affair with Mildred. In a key scene for his character, he shows Mildred a room he's arranged for her, decorated with mementos of her daughter and her restaurant; he delivers a moving and seemingly sincere speech about how much he admires rooms that reveal something of their owners, rooms where each object means something to those who inhabit them, and he expresses a wish to make this kind of life with Mildred. It's a very touching moment, and a genuine one, a moment that suggests that Monty has matured, that he really wants to create that happy, meaningful life with Mildred.


That touching moment of potential with Monty, the moment when it briefly seems as though a happy ending might actually be possible for this improbable couple, lingers over the remainder of the film, and makes what happens subsequently even more heartbreaking. Once Veda is back in Mildred's life, it's as though Monty has served his purpose, just as the business has served its purpose, and Mildred ignores each of them more and more. Mildred begins to seem less like the strong independent woman she had once been and more like a overbearing mother who's living through her daughter's life and accomplishments. In one scene, Monty tells Mildred that he'll be sleeping alone, leaving her to stay up late with Veda, and Mildred jokes, "I guess we're just middle-aged," but as Monty walks away down a long, shadowy hallway, shrouded in darkness, it seems obvious that he's not so flippant about his increasing (and rapid) marginalization in this marriage.

Mildred, however, seems more concerned with her daughter, since as Mildred calculated, Veda returns to her mother's life after the marriage, lured by the society wedding and the newly redecorated Pasadena mansion, so remote from the suburban Glendale mediocrity that Veda so despised as a girl. Veda, during her time away from home, has somewhat improbably become a classical opera singer after failing as a pianist, finally displaying the talent that Mildred had always sensed was in the girl. When Mildred first hears Veda sing, she's with Bert, listening to the radio, and Haynes' camera circles around the radio, focusing on the speaker and the sound mysteriously emanating from it, emphasizing the strange disconnection of this moment, the way Veda's voice emerges from the ether, the daughter who Mildred so desperately needs and hasn't seen in months suddenly crying and howling from the radio in airy, high-pitched trills. It becomes too much for Mildred: she walks away, standing by a dock in a composition that echoes a similar one from the 1945 Joan Crawford version of Mildred Pierce, although for Haynes it's not a melodramatic moment of near-suicide but a quiet interlude of contemplation.

Later, in the miniseries' biggest set piece, Mildred, Bert and Monty go to see Veda perform at the Philharmonic, a grand debut that Mildred watches with an expression somewhere between incomprehension and terror. She doesn't even look happy; she looks like she's watching a horror movie, on the verge of tears, over-awed by her daughter's talent, unable to understand how these sounds are emanating from her longtime object of fixation. At one point, Mildred borrows a pair of opera glasses, and Haynes inserts a shot of the view through the binoculars, magnifying Veda's face to reveal the sneering, angry expressions on her face as she sings, as though she's pulling her voice up from some deep, dark place within her, expressing her rage through these beautiful but demanding songs. Mildred looks away almost immediately, unable to deal with that, and she much prefers the encore when Veda unexpectedly sings a song that's implicitly meant for her mother, a song she knows her mother loves, and ends it by blowing a kiss. It's a tender gesture that might also be a sarcastic one, prefaced by an acknowledgment that she knows her mother's song doesn't belong on a Philharmonic program, just as she knows that her mother doesn't belong in the upper class.


All of this sets the stage for the harrowing and unforgettable climactic scene, a masterpiece of staging, in which Mildred finds Veda and Monty in bed together. Haynes really lets the long-bubbling Freudian psychosexual subtexts come raging to the surface at this point, as Mildred slumps against the wall, her mouth slack, her eyes disbelieving and wide, looking at her daughter languidly stretched out naked in bed. Wood's performance is at its over-the-top best here, cutting loose with this chilly girl's sneering, sinister slinkiness. As her mother breaks down in shock and Monty quickly recovers his suave act, Veda becomes downright evil, the full flowering of the nasty, self-motivated, manipulative evil that had shown up in flashes previously but is really unleashed here. She casually lights and smokes a cigarette, lying in bed, the blankets loosely draped over her, falling off her shoulders, smiling her cold smile. And then, in a moment of transcendent horror, she gets up out of the bed, deliberately allowing the blankets to fall away from her long, thin — snakelike — body, and walks naked across the room, parading her body in front of her mother, then sits in front of the mirror, still nude, combing her hair. It's an eerie, dreamlike scene, a nightmare in the flesh. Veda is provoking her mother, displaying herself to her, and the moment resonates with the earlier one in which Mildred had given her sleeping daughter a kiss on the lips that was more sapphic than motherly. This bedroom confrontation is a chilling, provocative sequence, a scene of high gothic melodrama that, in retrospect, Haynes' entire series was building towards.

That's the emotional crescendo of the entire miniseries, and it's very powerful, deliberately upstaging the staid, censorship-bound similar scene in the 1945 Hollywood Mildred Pierce. Haynes, sticking close to the James M. Cain source novel, avoids the murder mystery genre plotting from the Joan Crawford movie, but his film's climax is even more lurid, even more melodramatic, rising to operatic excesses to stage this horrific primal scene. The whole sequence ends with another striking composition, after Mildred has choked Veda, straining the girl's singing voice. Veda runs downstairs, clothed now only in a thin silk robe, staggers to the piano, crouches on the bench to bang out a few discordant notes, croaking awfully, then collapses to the ground beside a puddle of her own vomit. Haynes holds the terrible, emotionally devastating, ugly moment in a long shot, encompassing the shadowy high-ceilinged room with Veda collapsed in the background, Mildred standing in the middleground, and Monty in the foreground looking on in shock. It's a harrowing moment, and contrasted against the meticulous period detail and quotidian reality that dominate the rest of the series, it's as though Mildred has suddenly been plunged into an abyss, hurtling out of her average suburban lifestyle into a psychosexual nightmare.

Following this scene, Mildred has nowhere to go but back into the comforting arms of her first husband, Bert (Brian O'Byrne), and the ordinary suburban existence they once enjoyed. She flees from her daughter, from her business ambitions, from her social climbing rise into the upper class, and returns to boring, prosaic Glendale and the boring, prosaic marriage she'd once fled. The Hollywood film played this marital reconciliation as a happy ending, if a perfunctory one, but Haynes allows the full impact of this turn of events to resonate. It all ends with Bert's hollow insistence that everything will be alright, that they've got each other, and all the while there's such earnest desperation in his face, in the way he urgently pours two glasses of liquor for them. "Let's get stinko," he says, and Mildred repeats it for the last line of the film. And then she shoots the camera a gaze of such teary, red-eyed despair that it becomes instantly apparent that things are not alright, that this is not a Hollywood happy ending, that this couple has got years of drunken denial and disconnection still ahead of them.

Mildred Pierce (episode 3)

episodes 1-2 | episode 3 | episodes 4-5

The third episode of Todd Haynes' new Mildred Pierce miniseries opens in the immediate wake of the second episode's tragic conclusion. The younger daughter of Mildred (Kate Winslet) died at the end of the second episode, which concluded with a discrete pan away from Mildred embracing her surviving daughter Veda (Morgan Turner), and the third part of the series doesn't gloss over this grief but draws it out, lingering lovingly and sadly over the details. In the opening shot, Haynes' camera pans across Veda's sunlit room, the morning after the last episode's conclusion, and the sunny cinematography, the bright child's toys and decorations, are enough to suggest that maybe it was all a bad dream, until the moment when Mildred's gaze lands on the empty bed of her other daughter, at the same moment as Haynes guides the audience's gaze to the same spot.

In the subsequent scenes, Mildred balances her grief against the practicality and determination that constitute her essential nature; even when she's at her darkest moment, sobbing and despairing, she has the presence of mind to think of the need for a black dress. Haynes frames this moment in one of the through-a-window shots that characterize his style in Mildred Pierce, with Mildred's husband Bert (Brian O'Byrne) in the foreground and Mildred in the background with her friend Lucy (Melissa Leo), discussing her dress size and whether she should wear a veil or not. Soon, Mildred must lay out the clothes her daughter will wear to be buried, and she carefully lays out the clothes on the bed, smoothing out the wrinkles in a dress and placing a pair of socks down one by one. After the funeral, Haynes mirrors this sequence with a shot of Mildred similarly laying out her funereal black dress, straightening it out and hanging it up in the closet, putting it away as though she could put away her grief so neatly. In its quiet, methodical way, this opening is more devastating than a more showy, melodramatic evocation of grief, because it's so horrifyingly normal.

The emotions enter a more melodramatic register later in the episode, but Haynes' emphasis on details remains a constant presence. As in the first two parts of the series, Haynes keeps calling wry attention to the economics of the time, as even after Mildred gets her restaurant up and running, she still has to keep careful track of her money, counting every dollar. More than the first episodes of the series, Depression-era politics linger in the background here, with political speeches playing on radios and the end of Prohibition triggering changes for Mildred's business. The economics of the time are also at the forefront, as Haynes again takes every opportunity to demonstrate how much things cost at this time, taking particular ironic pleasure in a stop to a gas station where a full tank of gas costs a little over a dollar.


The bulk of this pivotal episode, however, focuses on the relationship between Mildred and the fading society heir Monty Beragon (Guy Pearce), who has retained his status and the significance of his family name even while losing all of his money. As he result, he takes money from Mildred even while looking down on her, mocking her status as a lowly working woman. In that, he has a co-conspirator in Veda, who has her own pretensions of upper-class privilege, and who naturally rejoices at Monty's presence in her mother's life. The scenes between Monty and Mildred dominate this episode, as their initially passionate and intense relationship is corrupted by Monty's disdain for work, and his contempt for Mildred's working class lifestyle. In several scenes, the couple argues, trading cutting words as Mildred begins to realize that Monty is not the man she thought he was, until Monty defuses the situation by seducing Mildred.

Despite it all, Mildred still desires him, and Monty knows that at this point, sex is the one thing he still has to offer — though he jokes that he's a gigolo, it often seems to be more or less true. These scenes are painful to watch, to see this strong woman, who's worked so hard and dealt with so much, brought down by this guy who's outwardly smooth and suave but actually quite pathetic. The thing is, Mildred, unlike so many other movie incarnations of the "strong woman," doesn't turn off or suppress her sexuality in the name of her career or her family — she might be making the wrong choice with Monty, but she's making it because she remains a sexual woman throughout all of her troubles. Probably the most telling moment in that respect is the scene when Monty shows up at Mildred's restaurant, preceded by buzz and excitement over his presence, with Mildred's two other men, Bert and her business manager/lover Wally (James LeGros), wondering how such a high society legend heard about the restaurant. When Monty then casually enters the kitchen and addresses Mildred intimately and familiarly, bringing her flowers, Mildred turns and suppresses a wicked smile in a napkin. Rather than being embarrassed or awkward, she's thrilled, proud, showing off Monty like a conquest, taking pleasure in introducing him to Bert and Wally. There's a social-climbing aspect to this pleasure, sure, the thrill of having this access to high society that the others clearly envy, but it's also the thrill of showing off her sexual prowess.

Haynes ends the episode with Mildred finally rejecting Monty's advances, driving to see him and then back home again in a lovingly photographed thunderstorm that externalizes Mildred's anger and confusion. On the way there, toward Monty's spacious but disused mansion, where most of the rooms are closed up, the furniture covered in white sheets, the stormy night seems to glow with eerie headlights illuminating accident scenes and slick roads. On the way back, after Monty flippantly jokes about raping Mildred — she momentarily gives in only to push him off and run away — the night has become even more threatening, even more sinister. The night seems to close in on Mildred, dark and intense, the roads narrow and surrounded on all sides by dark tangles of trees and foliage that seem to press in on her. That's an appropriate place to end this transitional episode that bridges the gap between the opening two hours and the next (and final) two episodes, which promise to leap forward several years into the future. Haynes' Mildred Pierce continues, in its precise and evocative way, to ably balance the naturalism of Haynes' period details against the creeping melodrama that's starting to emerge from the character interactions.

Mildred Pierce (episodes 1-2)

episodes 1-2 | episode 3 | episodes 4-5

Todd Haynes' new HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce is a fresh adaptation of the James M. Cain novel that had previously been adapted for Michael Curtiz's 1945 film of the same name. Haynes' expansive five-part miniseries, the first two parts of which aired on Sunday as a single two-hour block, takes its cues from the novel, rather than from Curtiz's noirish, overheated Joan Crawford melodrama. In the process, this new version expands into a potent, sprawling epic of the Depression era woman. Mildred (Kate Winslet) is placed in a difficult situation when she finally pushes her no-good husband Bert (Brian O'Byrne) out the door, sick of his laziness and his philandering with another woman. Mildred becomes a "grass widow," caring for her daughters Veda (Morgan Turner) and Ray (Quinn McColgan) on her own, making do at first with the meager proceeds from selling homemade pies, while she searches for a job in an economy with very few real prospects.

The signal virtue of Haynes' film is its meticulous attention to the economic realities of its era. In countless small details in the first episode of the series, Haynes emphasizes how every penny, every nickel, every dime must be carefully managed. On Mildred's first shopping trip after her husband leaves, she places items into her basket, weighing each one in her hand as she looks at the price, and Haynes pulls in for a tight closeup on the shopping basket as she mentally calculates the total cost, finally discarding an item that would push her over her budget. Later, when she gets a job as a waitress, her new employers make a point of telling her that the cost of her uniform will be deducted from her first check, and that any discrepancies at her tables will also be deducted, and that she'll have to buy her own shoes. The costs tally up quickly. As Mildred tells Veda in the second episode, everything in their lives, everything they own, has a cost, and Haynes makes sure that that cost is felt concretely, that every penny of it feels like it matters.

Haynes is similarly meticulous with every aspect of the film. The 1930s setting is believably tangible without any showy period touches; there's simply a constant sense of physicality in such details as Mildred's drab and obviously cheap undergarments, or the fruit vendors lined up along a cobbled street, or the tattoos on the arm of a blood donor, suggesting that only a lower-class man would be donating blood in this society, in this era. Haynes evokes the era with a direct but stylish aesthetic, using mostly pale, muted colors that add to the sense of reality. He's constantly shooting through glass, through windows that slightly distort and filter the view outside, as when Mildred is seen, contemplating her dim economic prospects, through the filthy front window of a diner, her face made indistinct by the gray grime layered on the glass. This is a film that is very much about the economic realities of the Depression for a single woman trying to provide for herself and her family, so the film's verisimilitude is vitally important. It also definitively sets Haynes' adaptation of the Cain novel apart from the famous 1945 Joan Crawford film, which not only shifted the story's era from the Depression to the then-current mid-1940s, but also offered an overheated vision very far removed from the physical and emotional realism of Haynes' version.


In that respect, Kate Winslet's performance as Mildred is a key component of the film's effect. Comparisons to Crawford are perhaps inevitable, but misplaced since Winslet's performance is in an entirely different register from her predecessor in this role. There's no melodrama in Winslet's performance, no excess. It's a warm, nuanced embodiment of a woman who, in the early scenes of the film, simply and abruptly decides that she's sick of the life she's been living, and over the course of the first two episodes begins to realize what she'd like to replace that life with. The first shot of the film is a closeup on Mildred's hands as she prepares pies for baking; Haynes immediately thrusts the audience into Mildred's world, a world of work and effort. In the subsequent scene, what starts as a routine conversation between Mildred and Bert — one immediately senses that they've had similar tense discussions many times — goes off-track when Mildred unexpectedly and casually drops the name of the woman that she knows Bert has been going to see. It's a remarkable moment, the truth suddenly bubbling up from out of this routine marital conversation, and afterward Mildred doesn't even quite seem to realize why she forced this confrontation, she just knows that she's reached a breaking point. Maybe it's the casual way that Bert says, "I don't see what else I can do around here," the careful phrasing of which Haynes utterly mocks because the audience can easily see the dirty pans and dishes stacked around the kitchen, while Mildred sits at the table working on yet another pie.

The film provides plenty of opportunities for Winslet to portray the complexities of this remarkable woman. In one scene from the second episode, when Mildred and Bert discuss finally getting a divorce and making their separation official and permanent, their conversation covers a wide range of emotions. The splitting couple is initially acrimonious and on edge, exchanging harsh words about one another's choices in romantic partners — Mildred has become involved with Bert's former business partner Wally (James LeGros) — but they soon begin gently joking about their situation, trying to laugh it off, and in their banter is visible a glimmer of the attraction they once must have felt for each other. The moment of warmth and humor segues seamlessly into tears, with Mildred breaking down, her face screwed up in anguish. It's a wonderful scene, a powerful acting showcase for Winslet especially, and it suggests the broad emotional palette that Haynes is working with here, tapping into the rich essence of Mildred's story and mining it for genuine, heartfelt drama rather than overwrought melodrama.

In the final act of the first episode, Winslet's Mildred conveys a sense of utter horror and desperation as she comes to grips with the prospect of having to lower herself in status in order to provide for her family. This class consciousness is most powerfully felt in a scene where Mildred goes for an interview to work as a maid in the house of a rich woman. Again and again throughout this sequence, Haynes holds one uncomfortable moment after another, allowing several beats to go by as Mildred attempts to swallow her pride, to choke down the bile rising up within her middle-class soul at being treated like a lowly servant. It starts when she knocks on the front door of the house, gets one look from the black servant who answers the door, and is immediately told to go around to the back. The door slams in Mildred's face, and Haynes holds the shot of her standing there, stunned into immobility. He holds the shot again after Mildred meets with the woman of the house and is told that she can't sit down without being told, causing Mildred to look startled again and stand up. When a second later the woman tells Mildred to sit down, the way Mildred holds her body, rail-straight and poised, suggests her pride struggling within her, resisting these demands for obedience and subservience.


Mildred is a very proud woman, and also a very tough one, a woman both of her time and astonishingly modern, even now. The film's portrait of Mildred constantly suggests the tension between the modern woman she's being forced to become and the conventional housewife she'd perhaps once been. Part of this is a growing sense of practicality, accepting that becoming a waitress to feed her family is nothing to be ashamed of — though she still can't bring herself to reveal her new job to her daughter Veda, who has very un-practical ideas about social standing and propriety, setting the stage for the conflicts that will drive the later chapters of this saga.

Mildred's modernity is refreshingly conveyed in the scenes from the series' second episode in which she first meets the wealthy but terminally lazy Monty Beragon (Guy Pearce) and impulsively decides to accept his flirtatious invitation to join him at his beach house. The sex scene between the two newly acquainted lovers is earthy and intense, emphasizing the straining muscles in Monty's forearms as his hand rests on the bed, holding up his body. Haynes' camera drifts sensually across the lovers' bodies, exploring the junction points between them, emphasizing the sweaty and surprisingly unglamorous contact between the toned Monty (with his dark brown tan, a product of empty days with nothing to do but lay on the beach) and the middle-aged but still sexy and curvy Mildred. Haynes purposefully contrasts this passionate scene, and the relaxed post-coital conversation of the lovers, against Mildred's comparatively awkward and passionless encounters with Wally, who she falls into bed with out of mere convenience and confusion. Haynes plays the sex with Wally for laughs: Wally gropes Mildred and they stumble around the room, nearly collapsing onto the bed, and as Mildred putters around her room afterward, Wally sits on the bed, balancing an ashtray on his rounded belly, an irredeemable comic figure.

Of course, Mildred's beachside interlude with Monty is followed by the tragic and heartrending conclusion to the second episode — culminating in a very lengthy final shot, a sustained look at Mildred's grief before a discrete pan around the corner to a dark wall — but even before this ending, the scenes at the beach with Monty resonate as a contrast against the rest of the film. It's a moment when Mildred is lifted out of her working class life, freed from the responsibilities of work even if only for a day. In a way, that's what attracts her to Monty, as suggested by the expression of mingled excitement and disgust that flashes across her face when she realizes that Monty doesn't actually do anything in his life, merely cashes the dividend checks he receives from his inherited family business. For Mildred, that's a glimpse of a whole other life, far removed from the bustling world of the restaurant, from the kneading of dough to make pies, from the necessity of counting every cent that buys her groceries. It all comes back to that grounding in the economic realities of the era in which the film is set, its emphasis on what money — and the lack of it, and the desire for it — really means.

The Conversations #19: Todd Haynes

Another installment of The Conversations has been posted at The House Next Door. For the first time in a while, Jason Bellamy and I have turned our attention to a comprehensive director overview, the first one we've done since our two-part discussion of Quentin Tarantino a year ago. I'm very excited about this new conversation on director Todd Haynes, which covers his film work starting with his hard-to-see underground short Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, up until his latest feature, I'm Not There. It's a long and wide-ranging conversation, one I'm especially proud of and happy with. Check it out, and as always be sure to comment; Jason and I had a lot to say on this subject, and we hope you do too!

Continue reading at The House Next Door

Films I Love #41: Safe (Todd Haynes, 1995)

Todd Haynes' Safe is a creepy, oblique horror movie about the horror of the "normal" life. It's a horror film in which there is no creeping monster behind the sedate suburban façade, no locus of evil that preys on the frazzled housewife Carol (Julianne Moore). The suburbs themselves are the source of the horror here: the ornately empty houses, the bored chatter of housewives with no real interests and nothing to talk about, the antiseptic routines of daily life, the lack of connections even to her own family. For the gay Haynes, straight existence itself is terrifying, a hellish, deadened nothingness with few escape routes. The first half of this film, in which Carol is isolated within her own palatial home as though stumbling in a narcotic daze, is a kind of warm-up for the pastel-colored Sirkian mise en scène of Haynes' Far From Heaven, in which he channeled Sirk's brightly colored vision of suburban Americana and the social ills lurking underneath. Safe is more oblique than both Sirk himself and than Haynes' later Sirk pastiche. There's something chilly and suffocating about this film, in the weirdly distanced interiors, so carefully set-decorated and lit, their precise geometric contours and patterned colors isolating Carol within a space where nothing betrays a hint of life or motion or vitality. Haynes' camera simply sits at a distance, observing stoically as this ordinary woman comes apart at the seams, becoming convinced that her very environment is trying to poison her.

The second half of the film largely abandons this stylized suburban crypt as Carol checks herself into a New Agey treatment facility that deals with amorphous illnesses caused by environmental factors. There, the urbanely sinister guru Peter Dunning (Peter Friedman) dispenses a variety of arcane "cures" and self-help advice to his patients. Haynes is not-so-subtly mocking the various charlatans and hippie commune-type facilities that exist on the fringes of this kind of Californian lifestyle, and especially the empty promises and rhetoric of so-called AIDS "cures." Carol, fleeing from the monotony of her zombified home life, winds up somewhere even worse, alienated even from her family, truly alone. By the film's end, she's locking herself up in a containment chamber where she can retreat from the world and try to come to terms with whatever her mysterious illness might be. With its halved structure, Safe asks whether the cure might sometimes be worse than the disease, or whether there is really any escape from the kind of soul-numbing existence depicted here, the deep existential emptiness that Carol feels eating away at her from within.

Far From Heaven

Far From Heaven is Todd Haynes' loving, flawlessly constructed tribute to the cinema of one of his favorite directors, Douglas Sirk, and especially to Sirk's All That Heaven Allows. That film, about a society widow who invites gossip and disgrace by developing a friendship and eventually a romance with her younger gardener, provides the germ of the idea for Haynes' own take on Sirkian melodrama. Sirk also provides Haynes with a window through which he can look back on the 1950s, not as it truly was, but as it might have been, refracted through the ornate stained glass of Sirk's melodramas. Everything bathed in lurid pastel lights and colors, everything a facade as patently artificial as a Happy Days set. This artificiality is part of the point. This vision of the 50s, a TV fantasia with relentlessly cheerful wives, clean-scrubbed kids, and hard-working husbands, is an artifice so obvious that it's just begging to be peeled back. What Haynes finds when he digs through a few layers is barely concealed racism, sexual ignorance, and families held together by tradition and appearance rather than any real feeling or communication.

This turns out to be especially true for Cathy (Julianne Moore), the happy wife of successful advertising executive Frank Whitaker (Dennis Quaid). The couple are models for their friends and indeed their entire suburban Connecticut town, throwing well-loved parties, raising their two children, and generally projecting an aura of contentment and success to all who see them. This happy facade falls apart when Cathy discovers her husband in the arms of a man, a sign that he is diseased in some way: he's "one of those." But this is only the beginning of Cathy's troubles, as she soon finds that her developing friendship with her black gardener — a friendship that, like the one in Sirk's film, is tinged with unarticulated desire — causes even more problems, stirring up hateful gossip around the town. Haynes is here borrowing from both Sirk and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose Fear Eats the Soul already paid homage to All That Heaven Allows by widening the age gap between the protagonists and making their primary difference racial rather than class-based. And just as Fassbinder roots this relationship in the political and social climate of its period, 1970s Germany with its concerns about Arab immigration and integration, Haynes makes Far From Heaven squarely about the civil rights movement. There are numerous references to the NAACP and to the crisis in Little Rock regarding the resistance to school integration. It is in this context, far removed from the nation's most overt expressions of racism but nevertheless far from integrated as well, that Haynes' melodrama plays out.


This acute awareness of context and place runs through every aspect of the film, which like the best Sirk films exaggerates and satirizes its milieu without removing the characters from reality. Cathy and Frank are a TV sitcom American family at first, so cheerful and bright that they can hardly be real, and yet over the course of the film each character begins to open up, to express their emotions more openly, to articulate the worries and desires that have been bottled up inside them. Quaid and Moore both give phenomenal performances, and Moore especially is jaw-dropping. Haynes obviously loves her face, and her many expressive closeups allow her to act with subtlety and grace, telling stories with just the movement of her mouth, the corners of her lips spreading into a wide fake smile, as if by instinct, only to collapse into a more neutral expression. Increasingly, she comes to seem like a real woman somehow inhabiting the hollowed-out shell of a sitcom mom, her improbably bright dresses furling around her, her blonde curls bouncing, even as her emotions threaten to flood over her.

This disjunction between the artifice of the sets and the intensity of the emotions the characters are feeling extends throughout the film. Haynes' sets are meticulous, brilliantly colored, capturing the feel of Sirk's Technicolor fantasias and in some ways even going far beyond the look of Sirk's own films. There's something even more knowingly artificial in the way that Haynes uses light as a veil over a particular space, defining its look and mood independently of any actual light sources within the scene. There are several scenes in which Haynes layers a warm blue light over the entire frame. When Cathy confronts Frank after a party where he got drunk and became nasty, their darkened living room is bathed in blue light, and Haynes moves the camera from a long shot of the two of them, tracking with Cathy as she walks forward, until the shot is reframed with her alone. She stands there, slightly to the right in the frame, the thick blue light working to obscure her reaction to Frank, to soften the contortions her face is going through as she struggles to keep her emotions in check, to act the part of the dutiful wife she's supposed to be playing.


Far From Heaven is an astonishing work of homage, one that attempts to understand and explore its subject from every angle, in every aspect. This is not only a remarkable surface-level tribute to Sirk (though, aesthetically and visually, it is that too) but a tribute to the director's mastery of the form of melodrama as a vehicle for social commentary and satire. Haynes, like Sirk, is continually concerned with pushing beyond surface appearances, revealing taboo subjects in unexpected places. Sirk could not, of course, deal as directly with sexuality or race in his own work, instead hinting at his characters' darker subtexts in whatever ways he could. Haynes, with the luxury of a less censorial film industry, lets these things bubble up, lets the Sirkian artifice crumble to see what might lie underneath: genuine, living, breathing people, with hang-ups and suppressed desires, struggling to maintain a glamorous, happy version of themselves that could only have existed, if anywhere, in a 1950s Hollywood movie.

Poison

Poison was the first feature for Todd Haynes, following up on the super-low-budget home-video aesthetics of his infamous short Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. In Poison, Haynes employs a multitude of cinematic styles and reference points in order to tell three thematically related but narratively distinct tales of abuse, disease, sexuality, and ostracization. The film continuously cuts between the three stories rather than keeping them separate, each of them steadily building towards an inevitably violent climax, and Haynes heightens the film's patchwork feel by shooting each sequence in a different style. In "Hero," the young boy Richie Beacon shoots his father and then, according to his shell-shocked mother, flies out the window, never to be seen again. Haynes presents this story in the form of an after-the-fact objective documentary, an outgrowth of the non-Barbie portions of Superstar, in which those who knew Richie are interviewed. As its title would suggest, "Horror" draws liberally from the genres of 40s and 50s monster movies and sci-fi mad scientist tales, to tell the story of Dr. Tom Graves (Larry Maxwell), a scientist whose isolation of the human sex drive into serum form accidentally infects him with a highly infectious plague. Finally, the bluntly titled "Homo," adapted from the work of the writer Jean Genet — who also provided more diffuse inspiration for the other two tales — features a moodily shot story of sexuality and violence between prison inmates.

The film draws its strength from the way that Haynes sets up three seemingly different stories and then slowly, inexorably begins pointing out the connections between them. As diverse as these stories are in terms of genre, style, characters, and narrative, they each deal with the ways in which sexual differences and sexual discovery are linked to trauma and social stigma. Each story explores what seems to be a primal theme for Haynes: the individual's discovery, often in the context of a terrifying childhood, that society's price for defying conformity is very great indeed. This theme is perhaps most present in young Richie Beacon, who barely appears within the film (only a few brief, silent shots in montage) but who nevertheless emerges as a character through the testimonies of his mother (Edith Meeks), neighbors, and classmates, who describe the boy's life before his violent act and subsequent disappearance. Richie, it slowly becomes apparent, was a bright but tormented boy, frequently beaten by both his parents and the kids at school, both for no good reason and, it seems, because he masochistically taunted and goaded his peers into assaulting him. At one point, a neighbor recounts how Richie, at six years old, ran naked onto her lawn, went to the bathroom right in front of her, and then ran away again — "like an animal," she says, with visceral disgust. As it turns out, Richie's anger and acting out seem to well from his developing sexual feelings. There are more than a few hints that Richie may be gay, or at least sexually "different," and that to some extent his behavior is a result of extreme confusion, exacerbated by the increasing violence of the fights between his parents.

Haynes' depiction of the family, like his depictions of "normal" bourgeoisie existence in general (see the withering satire of conformity in Safe), puts the emphasis on the extreme pressures generated in those who fail to live up to the standards of normality set by society. In this light, Richie's silent but obviously prodigious act of resistance is a fantasy of escape; indeed, it is a fantasy that apparently had its origins in one of Richie's own stories, as one of his teachers tells us. Richie has lived a dream for those who are ostracized and cast out: to kill their primary tormentor, become the "hero" of the segment's title, and vanish forever in a glorious escape. Richie's flight into the sky, memorably visualized in the final frames of the film as the camera pans upwards into a white-hot sky, is an escape from middle American conformity and enforced normality. The high cost of such escapes is felt more forcefully in the "Horror" segment, a rather obvious metaphor for the AIDS epidemic and the shame of being gay in an era when it had become practically a synonym for deadly contagion.


In the "Horror" segment, Haynes draws on a diverse blend of cinematic reference points, from the B-grade (monster movies and film noir) to the exemplary (the deep-focus compositions and eccentric camera angles of Orson Welles). The tragedy of Dr. Graves is his transformation into a leprous monstrosity at exactly the moment of his greatest triumph. He had just isolated the human sex drive in the form of a liquid, the result of long research, and moreover had just been introduced to the perky, lovely doctor Nancy (Susan Norman), a perpetually smiling 1950s-era all-American gal who greatly admires his research and is eager to work with him. Instead, as Graves' face gradually melts away, leaving behind trails of grisly warts and scarring, he goes on the prowl, infecting women in bars with his leprous kisses. Haynes borrows the structure of the typical Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story, and all its cinematic variations, to provide the perfect metaphorical construct: innocent, loving sexuality transformed into something ugly, diseased, and deadly. It's a potent metaphor, and Graves is a complicated figure, by turns sympathetic, pathetic, and frightening.

Graves' steadily escalating fury at the unfairness of his predicament only builds after he finally infects Nancy with his disease. One of the film's most poignant character arcs is found in the way Graves at first resists and rebuffs Nancy's frequent declarations of love, not wishing to harm her. But when he finally accepts her kiss, believing that she understands the consequences, she is horrified and outraged to find that he is contagious and has doomed her. Graves' fall is completed with a frantic dash from the police, hinted at in the film's opening and then developed to its tragic end later in the film. In a sequence that visually references Welles, Graves ransacks his apartment, destroying his chemical equipment, with Haynes cutting between low-angle closeups of the enraged scientist and reaction shots of the beakers and glassware shattering against the wall. As Graves deteriorates further, his face crusting over with thick scales, becoming slimy and lizard-like, he delivers an impassioned speech to the crowds harassing him — crowds who, in true monster movie tradition, might as well have pitchforks. The implicit comparison links modern-day homophobia and anti-gay violence to the persecution of the inevitably tragic monster from a classic Universal thriller, many of which (Frankenstein, The Creature From the Black Lagoon) cast their central freaks as misunderstood romantics who only desired emotional connection and were cruelly punished for it.


The third strand of the film is represented by the "Homo" story, which is the film's most literal exploration of gay themes and also, to some extent, the spark that illuminates the gay themes running through the other two stories. The story itself is drawn from a novel by the French writer Jean Genet, and is also clearly inspired by Genet's only film, the intensely homoerotic short Un chant d'amour, also set in a prison. This section of the film follows the habitual thief John Broom (Scott Renderer), an orphan who has been in and out of prison since he was a teenager. He develops a strong affection for his fellow inmate Jack Bolton (James Lyons), who he remembers as a willowy and taciturn kid who was always picked on in reform school, and who has grown into a tough, domineering figure. This segment is further subdivided between Broom's memories of his reform school youth, and the present-day sequences set in the prison where Broom and Bolton meet again as adults. The flashbacks are bright, airy, and heavily stylized, recalling the lurid sexual and visual excesses of late Fellini or Pasolini, while the present-day scenes are dark, moody, and shadowy, heavily favoring deep blues with little trace of other colors.

Nevertheless, Broom's teenage memories do not represent the homoerotic idyll that they would seem to be at first. In fact, he remembers watching, as an unseen voyeur lurking on the fringes, scene after scene of humiliation, torture, and sexual taunting, most of it directed at the young Bolton. The bright, brilliant style of these scenes rubs uneasily against the often nauseating content, and it all culminates in a horrifying sequence where Bolton is forced to stand against a wall with his mouth open while the other boys, standing some distance away, spit on him and try to land the gobs of mucus and saliva in his mouth. Haynes stretches this scene out to a discomfiting length, ratcheting up the queasy disgust generated by Bolton's humiliation, as the spit lands all over his face and clothes, gathering in splotches and running all over him, with Haynes occasionally cutting away to the gleeful crowd of boys jumping up and down or the watchful, silent Broom.

Whereas the other two segments of Poison deal metaphorically with the ostracization and persecution of gays and other societal outcasts by the forces of the majority, "Homo" presents perhaps the film's ugliest and most horrifying vision: the self-hatred, self-flagellation, and abuse that exists within even these outcast communities. Haynes takes the romantic, poetic prison vision of Genet's Un chant d'amour and twists it into something violent, hateful, and just as hierarchical and constrained as the mainstream society it supposedly counters. As a result, the hint of deeper emotions that briefly seem imminent between the two convicts soon develop into something much darker, finally exploding into violence and tragedy. Despite the touches of gleeful Hollywood pastiche in the "Horror" section, Poison is a remarkably bleak film, in which the forces of oppression are virtually omnipresent, and the possibilities seem slim for forging a genuine, satisfying sexual multiplicity outside of the narrowly conceived boundaries of "normality." It is, obviously, a howl of rage and protest from Haynes, whose voice seems equally present in the murderous Richie who is never able to express himself directly, in Graves who delivers his entreaty against shame to an uncomprehending audience, and in Broom whose heartfelt declarations of love are met with rejection and scorn. It's only with the film's final shot, Richie's ecstatic and angelic flight from the corporeal world, that Haynes presents something like a vision of hope within the film. Each of the film's three sections deal with the conflicting and complex emotions involved with being different in modern America, and combined they form a compelling patchwork meditation on shame, desire, hidden emotions, and persecution.

11/26: I'm Not There

I've seen a lot of people asking what exactly Todd Haynes' I'm Not There has to tell us about Bob Dylan, its ostensible subject. This is, of course, the wrong question. Moreover, it's the question that Haynes' film is specifically intended to short-circuit, to avoid, and it's likewise the question that Dylan has structured his career around hiding from. He's not there, not in this film, and not in his music either, not the way anyone ever wants or expects him to be. I'm Not There has a lot to say, but not necessarily about Dylan, and not necessarily in the easily digested bites that seem to be desired by those doing the asking. The question implies that the film should dissect Dylan, explain him, relate key incidents in his life without artifice and show how the music is related to the life. That's what biopics do, right? It's a damn good thing this isn't a biopic.

What it is, is something much more complicated and beautiful. Haynes has taken Dylan and fragmented him, thrown bits and pieces of his persona, music, and chameleonic life into six different characters, all playing various ghosts of a living Dylan who's shed or absorbed all these aspects of himself to create whatever he is now. There's Marcus Carl Franklin as Woody Guthrie, an eleven-year-old black boy who's still anachronistically riding the rails in 1959, seemingly living in an earlier era in the time of burgeoning civil rights protests. There's Christian Bale as Jack Rollins, the protest-era Dylan, pushed onto stage by Joan Baez stand-in Alice (Julianne Moore) to belt out his heartfelt socially conscious songs. And Bale returns later in the film for a second turn as Pastor John, Jack transformed into a deeply religious minister in a reflection of Dylan's 80s turn to God. In between these two poles, there's Cate Blanchett in a shockingly powerful portrayal of Jude, essentially the mid-60s, gnomic burn-out Dylan as depicted in Pennebaker's Don't Look Back. And Ben Whishaw as Arthur (Rimbaud, naturally), the sensitive poet Dylan, whose role consists entirely of cryptic non-sequiturs delivered to a panel of interviewers who inevitably bring to mind the McCarthy Senate hearings. There's also Robbie (Heath Ledger), an actor who once played the younger Dylan in a movie before heading into an increasingly bitter and disenchanted life. Finally, in the film's weirdest diversion, Richard Gere plays Billy the Kid, a nod to Dylan's scoring of (and cameo in) Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

This diverse cast comprises a series of Dylan echoes, referencing and riffing on the musician but never quite forming any composite portrait. Haynes has blended these different elements together, not chronologically in terms of their place in Dylan's career, but in a dense free-associative montage that's constantly switching between stories, musical numbers, and meditative abstractions anchored by Kris Kristofferson's narration. As a fan of Dylan's music with a casual knowledge of his life, I was able to follow the web of associations pretty easily, as the film skips nimbly around from image to image. I'd imagine that non-Dylan fans would be missing out on a lot here, since Haynes doesn't make it easy to parse the complex accumulations of Dylan doppelgängers and coded references that are packed into almost every scene.

I myself was initially puzzled by the Billy the Kid sequence, wondering why Dylan's Pat Garrett soundtrack (musically a minor work) was being given such prominent treatment, until I realized that these scenes occupied a space within the film akin to Dylan's motorcycle crash and subsequent retreat to record his Basement Tapes with the Band. This sequence's retreat to the past mirrors Dylan's own retreat to America's musical past following his accident, drawing on both his own early folk and blues songs, along with a healthy dose of country. Furthermore, Gere's Old-West ramble through the carnivalesque town of Riddle (what better name?) recalls the circus imagery of any number of Dylan songs, as well as the assemblage of downtrodden and outrageous characters from "Desolation Row." These kinds of associations, references, and evocations of lyrics make up the very fabric of this film. Still, I think the film has plenty to offer even complete Dylan neophytes, in terms of the sheer beauty of its imagery, the wonderful tapestry of Dylan's music (mostly originals with a few new performances) that weaves through the film, and the idea of artistic rejuvenation that's embodied in Haynes' treatment of Dylan's many faces.

I hear that nagging voice again, though: so what does all this tell us about Dylan? Again, the wrong question, and one that's ironically a variation on the probing questions asked of Blanchett's Jude by a British journalist, who keeps trying to pin down Jude to a sound-bite-friendly cliché. This is probably the finest scene in the film, and Haynes allows it to morph slowly from a tense Q-and-A session into a nightmarish, noir-inspired music video of Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man," with the journalist as Mr. Jones, who just knows that something is happening but doesn't understand what it is. Eventually, disturbed by Jude/Dylan's refusal to provide pat answers or give the TV-ready stock phrases that these leading questions demand, the journalist airs a program in which he "exposes" Jude's roots as an ordinary, suburban Jew from an affluent family. Does this reductionism to the question of roots, of background, explain anything about Jude or Dylan?

Of course not, and though such explanations and questions aren't Haynes' interest, he doesn't shy away from the core of Dylan's art, the shape-shifting nature of Dylan's persona, always inaccessible but otherwise quite different from one incarnation to the next. In fact, Haynes embodies this eclectic sense of personality not only in his multiple Dylans, but in the stylistic melange with which he surrounds them, drawing on his obviously rich filmic knowledge for a web of cinematic references every bit as dense as his musical ones. The Jude sequences draw most obviously on Don't Look Back — it would be impossible for Blanchett's sneering, mumbling, leather-clad impersonation not to recall the Dylan of that era — but more subtly these scenes reference Fellini's 8 1/2 with its warped visages of hangers-on, and in turn Woody Allen's own Fellini homage in Stardust Memories, with murals on the walls reflecting the character's inner states.

Even more than Fellini, though, this is Haynes' channeling of Godard. I've always thought that Godard, possibly my favorite director, has had a purely superficial impact in terms of the impact he's passed on to other directors. Only Fassbinder ever really seemed to "get" Godard and take his influence in a truly interesting direction, while countless other directors latched onto jump cuts and other surface aesthetic features. With I'm Not There, Haynes has arrived as another truly Godardian filmmaker, in the best possible sense. Yes, there are some of those kinds of surface aesthetic references, right down to the way the introduction of the film's title text, letter by letter, plays off of different combinations to alter meanings: I, I'm here, I'm her, I'm there, I'm not her. Likewise, the scene where Jude and his/her electric band literally machine-guns an audience of folk fans, before symbolically machine-gunning them with the force of their radically rule-breaking music. Haynes also plays with machine-gun rhythms in the periodic repetition of the portraits of his six Dylan stand-ins, and certain scenes specifically recall One Plus One or Masculin feminin. But Haynes has also absorbed Godard's influence in more subtle ways. Indeed, the film's essay-film structure, seamlessly blending narrative fragments with more ruminative interludes and purely abstract montage with poetic/philosophical voiceover, would be impossible without Godard's example.

Haynes has also taken Godard's example as to the importance of the soundtrack and its relation to the imagery, though there's nothing specifically Godardian about the way that Haynes uses sound here. The only similarity is the denseness of the sound, the complex layering, not just for the interplay of different sounds, but the meanings contained within them. Dylan's music is of course ubiquitous, his lyrics frequently commenting on scenes. Sometimes, ingeniously, Haynes allows the lyrics to comment even if they're not being sung yet. The noirish dream sequence I already mentioned was initially a bit mystifying, until I realized that the music from "Ballad of a Thin Man" was looping underneath it, and as I mentally filled in the lyrics they began to mirror and comment on what was happening on screen — and moments later, when the vocals actually begin, there's an echo effect, as well as, probably, a moment of realization for those not already familiar with the song.

I have absolutely no trouble calling I'm Not There a masterpiece. Haynes has crafted a film that, in saying nothing about Dylan, says everything about the nature of artistic experimentation and adaptation, the many ways in which art can be political, and the attempts of the cultural elites to impose their own neatly ordered narratives on the messy, shifty, angry artist. Haynes rejects such narratives out of hand. His narratives here are more like Dylan's own "narratives," in his story-songs like "Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest," in which the semblance and structure of a story being told is belied by the poetical nonsense that comprises it. Haynes embraces that nonsensical spirit, and the result is one of the finest, sweetest, warmest evocations of artistic expression imaginable.