Todd Haynes achieves something complex in his Sirk homage. He bestows pathos on characters who at first seem laughable, even absurd. The film was released in 2002 and perhaps the lens through which an audience might watch the film has changed over the course of the last 25 years. Moore’s Cathy struggles to cope with her husband Frank’s gay infidelity, The tone is melodramatic. Moore’s impeccably coiffed hair seems as much of a character as either of her children. Quaid’s Frank breaks down and weeps and then pinballs around like an archetypal repressed North American bourgeois. Everything is so on point that it feels like a pastiche, as indeed it is. It’s impossible not to laugh at these characters and their cliched fifties behaviour. Surely this is a world that we have left behind? Dennis Haysbert’s Raymond is the down-to-earth antidote to all this. A man whose solid decency transcends the boundaries of race and class. No wonder Cathy falls for him. All the same, this world and its characters feel like a caricature. Then something remarkable happens, in large part through the performances of Moore and Haysbert. The characters seem to slip the pastiche net. Their emotional distress touches us. The film becomes a film about love. its power and its limitations. These emotions are, of course, timeless.
Twenty five years later, even those elements of the film that seem wilfully contrived suddenly feel far more plausible. Conservatism is back. Prejudice is back. The closet is back. It seems like we’re slipping back into the absurd, divided world of the fifties.
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