Far From Heaven

Todd Haynes set his 2002 chronicle of social isolation and forbidden love, Far From Heaven—a reimagining of Douglas Sirk’s 1955 All That Heaven Allows—in the same era and milieu, meticulously re-creating the mid-century architecture, costumes, and production design of Sirk’s technicolor melodramas. Julianne Moore plays Cathy Whitaker, happily married to successful executive Frank (Dennis Quaid); they are beloved pillars of the community. But Frank’s secret life and Cathy’s friendship with their Black gardener, Raymond (Dennis Haysbert), a kind single father with a business degree and interest in art, expose the limits of tolerance and the price of transgression.