I knew I was in trouble when I saw those rear fender skirts on the 1955 Buick Special Estate Wagon in the opening scene. This languid, heavy melodrama began to get on my nerves at once. As a re-creation of a style of film-making that relied on imitating what was already a tendentious imitation in its own time, this is what the cliché "trainwreck in slow motion" is all about. Lovely and beautiful in its own way, it nevertheless comes across for anyone over the age of fifty more as a curiosity than a work of art.
Melodrama relies greatly on self-reference, and this one has it in spades (Oops!). Everything is so obvious and banal to those of us who lived through the time in question that we can only laugh at Director Haynes as he waxes ecstatic about how marvelous and evocative of the 1950's were those old films of Director Sirk. The irony of his comments in the DVD package I viewed -- as images of old Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman movies played across the screen -- was entirely lost. Background scenes of the Little Rock episode in 1957 are displayed not as actual advances in human awareness affecting decades of a real social struggle, but as quirky takes on some notion that the 1950's exists only in a time warp. Stereotypes of stereotypes.
Julianne Moore floats grandly through her role, as always. And Quaid is predictably stolid -- no Rock Hudson, he. The rest of the cast speak their lines equally tongue-in-cheek, and New Jersey posing as Connecticut in Autumn (or is it Spring?) passes.
Seriously, I never saw in real life ANY Buick with fender skirts.
Melodrama relies greatly on self-reference, and this one has it in spades (Oops!). Everything is so obvious and banal to those of us who lived through the time in question that we can only laugh at Director Haynes as he waxes ecstatic about how marvelous and evocative of the 1950's were those old films of Director Sirk. The irony of his comments in the DVD package I viewed -- as images of old Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman movies played across the screen -- was entirely lost. Background scenes of the Little Rock episode in 1957 are displayed not as actual advances in human awareness affecting decades of a real social struggle, but as quirky takes on some notion that the 1950's exists only in a time warp. Stereotypes of stereotypes.
Julianne Moore floats grandly through her role, as always. And Quaid is predictably stolid -- no Rock Hudson, he. The rest of the cast speak their lines equally tongue-in-cheek, and New Jersey posing as Connecticut in Autumn (or is it Spring?) passes.
Seriously, I never saw in real life ANY Buick with fender skirts.