That Nicole Kidman got the Oscar for best actress and not Julianne Moore — for her work in Far from Heaven — is simply baffling. The only plausible explanation would be that the Moore vote was split between her Far from Heaven lead and her best-supporting-actress nomination for The Hours, in which she out-acted Kidman by some considerable margin — and, in fact, probably spent more time on screen. Those two roles of Moore’s are intriguing echoes of one another. In both, she plays a Fifties housewife; in The Hours (opening here next month), she is quietly battling an overwhelming despair, for reasons never fully fleshed out in that movie, while in Far from Heaven she has to deal with a gay husband and a friendship with a black man that causes malicious tongues to wag in the leafy suburbs of Hartford, Connecticut.Both these issues — homosexuality and race — are topics that a movie set and made in the Fifties, under the draconian hypocrisy of the Hayes Code, would have been careful to avoid dealing with openly, unless of course it was an hysterical warning against the perils of same-sex bonking or racial mingling. Therein, in part, lies the brilliance of Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven, for he has made this movie in the style of one of the Fifties’ most characteristic directors, Douglas Sirk, master of the “woman’s picture”, but even as Haynes mimics Sirk he says what the typical Sirk melodrama could not. Thus he does something akin to what Pedro Almodóvar so masterfully accomplishes: he takes the overwrought and often rather hollow emotions of melodrama and returns them to irrefutably human dimensions. He fills them up again with reality.The style of Far from Heaven, in fact, is one of the movie’s central triumphs. It is as lushly stylised as can be — part of what a woman wants, or wanted, apparently, in a “woman’s picture”, is some attractive interior decoration, not to mention good-looking clothes. Don’t we all? But here, more so than in many another movie, style is content. This is pastiche, but put to uses greater than mere parody. A useful contrast would be Haynes’s own take on Seventies glam rock, Velvet Goldmine, a pastiche that came unpasted.The look of Far from Heaven adds a layer of irony to the story, as well as simply pleasing the eye. The Fifties decor is meticulously reconstructed, and is indeed also part of the content, in that a beautiful home would have been essential to the ideal(ised) family life that Moore’s character, Cathy Whitaker, is supposed to be leading. In one delightful scene early in the film, she is interviewed by a local paper as an exemplar of gracious and successful living, and naturally she is interviewed (and photographed) in her beautiful home. (The only exception to the impeccable detail of the mise en scène that I could discern was the presence of a glitter ball in a dance hall; I am informed that such balls did, in fact, exist in the Fifties, but the resonance it carries, now, is perhaps too strongly Seventies.)Even things that seem like simple visual flourishes, references to the ancestors of Haynes’s picture, serve a dramatic and narrative purpose. In the opening shot, we see the Whitakers’ neat, cheery suburb from on high, through a skein of autumnal leaves; the camera gracefully describes an arabesque as it descends toward the ground, like a god coming down from Olympus to observe the foibles of humanity. The symbolism soon becomes obvious — the Whitakers’ summer of perfect happiness is coming to an end. But Haynes will keep riffing on that symbol until it is doing more than just highlighting the meaning of the action — those leaves and branches practically become a character in their own right. And that’s not all. The very colours of the film are doing something important. They are wonderfully coordinated, but they also have that slight distortion of hue of those old Technicolor movies: they seem a little too rich, and not quite real. At moments they seem to have been applied, perhaps too liberally, by hand. And they hint that all is not what it seems, that some subtle distortion of the American dream has taken place. As for the music, Elmer Bernstein, veteran of more than 200 movie scores, has been called in — and given free rein. It is a truism of cinema criticism to say that if you notice the music there’s something wrong; in Far from Heaven, the music is all but incessant, and very ripe it is too. It would be right to say there’s too much of it, except that all of it is so right. Now I’ve gone on about the movie’s style for perhaps too long — though it is intoxicating. It would all be rather artificial and superficial, however, if there weren’t real presences at its centre. And there, majestic in her modest housewifeliness and even more majestic in her looming tragedy, is Cathy Whitaker, which is to say Moore. Supporting her more than ably is Dennis Quaid as her husband. He and his demons are perhaps a little skimpily sketched, but after all the movie is primarily about Cathy, not him. Quaid, a considerable actor who has taken some interesting risks in his career, is surely doing his best work here. Dennis Haysbert as Raymond, the black gardener with whom Cathy develops a friendship, is a solid, warm, likeable and even inspiring presence. He wins our hearts as he does Cathy’s. And she, of course, has already conquered us utterly.