Haynes’ hysterical history

It’s one thing to ape a film genre. It’s quite another to do a paint-by-number simulation of said genre. Yet a simulation is exactly what director Todd Haynes (“Safe”) has created with “Far From Heaven,” a film he not only directed but wrote, though he owes at least a passing nod to Douglas Sirk’s 1955 weeper “All That Heaven Allows.”

Set in 1957 Hartford, Conn., Haynes’s film imagines a perfect couple – Frank and Cathy Whitaker (Dennis Quaid, Julianne Moore) – who find that life isn’t so perfect after all. Seems Frank is gay, living a lie, and when Cathy finds out, she seeks solace in the words (not in the arms of) Raymond, the couple’s black gardener (Dennis Haysbert).

That’s pretty much it, though most of the film’s 100-minute running time is used for things to play out to their predictable end. Oh, there are pressures and subplots, most involving irony: Seems it’s bad for Frank to hit Cathy but worse for her to have a drink with Raymond. But there’s nothing here that we haven’t seen before.

Haynes hasn’t made a movie about life in 1957, he’s made a movie that duplicates what a 1957 movie would look like – complete with corny dialogue, “Father Knows Best” sentiments, Moore’s overly breathy style of line delivery and, worst of all, Elmer Bernstein’s overorchestrated musical score. It was easy to understand why Gus Van Sant would want to make a shot-by-shot remake of Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” but it’s far harder to understand why anyone – especially somebody as supposedly hip as Haynes – would want to re-create a movie from one of the most boring decades of the 20th century.