³Do you think people can see beyond the surface of things?” It’s not hard to ferret out the themes of Far from Heaven, Todd Haynes’ magnificently obsessed version of a Douglas Sirk melodrama. Set in 1950s Hartford, Conn. -- which functions as a generic mid-size town caught between rustic values and encroaching metropolitan moral laxity -- the film fills out the contours of a stock ’50s melodrama (complete with vintage Elmer Bernstein score). Cathy (a blond, peppy Julianne Moore) is the perfect suburban wife and hostess, with two children, a black maid (Viola Davis) and a hard-working husband, Frank (Dennis Quaid). Their placid existence is literally picture-perfect: Frank’s company uses an illustration of the two of them in its advertising campaigns. “Here’s to Frank and Cathy,” says a friend, raising a toast at their Christmas party. “Truly Mr. and Mrs. Magnatech.”

But all is not well in the Magnatech household. Frank starts to work even later than usual, and the music signals danger as we watch him pour liquor into his coffee. He slips out of work, but finds himself heading out, instead of home, to a dimly lit underground bar where a lisping, pencil-mustached character with slicked-back hair checks his ID at the door. In a real '50s melodrama, this is as far (farther, even) than we'd go: Audiences of the time wouldn't have missed the implication that Frank was drifting into a life of sexual perversion, and he'd end up either dead or doomed by the final reel. But Haynes twists the genre against itself -- Frank's plight is portrayed as it would have been at the time, but we're understanding, not clucking our tongues.

The resurgence of the passion Frank thought he'd quelled is hardest on Cathy, who turns to her gardener Raymond (Dennis Haysbert) for help. Trouble is, Raymond is black, and in 1950s Hartford, their relationship is more than unseemly. At first, her friends (including the magnificent Patricia Clarkson) tease her, in the words of a fawning society newspaper profile, about her "kindness to Negroes," but as her marriage to Frank grows worse and eventually dissolves, Cathy's relationship to Raymond grows deeper, more emotionally intimate (although, bound by social mores and by Haynes' self-imposed Hays code, the two hardly even touch). Haysbert, best known as the president on TV's 24, exudes decency and dignity from every pore; clad in work shirts that could have been pilfered from Rock Hudson's All That Heaven Allows wardrobe, he's the essence of masculine stability. Moore, as she was in Haynes' Safe, is feminine fragility incarnate, an open wound bound with a violet scarf. Even before her world begins to fly apart, Cathy seems to be in pain through every smile.

Unlike traditional melodrama characters, though, Cathy isn't brought low because of her faults, but because of her strengths. However frowned upon for her relationship with Raymond, Cathy never actually cheats on her husband, even after she knows he's cheated on her. She believes what she's been taught about equality and loyalty, and the betrayals of her husband and friends leave her with nothing to cling to but her own idea of what's right. Her real virtue is endurance; though she takes small steps toward self-improvement -- a phone call to the NAACP, for example, that goes uncompleted when Frank stumbles home soused -- it's Cathy's stillness that brings out the best and worst in those around her.

Far from Heaven is a stylistic marvel, so effective at recreating the ambience of a 1950s Hollywood production that it's a genuine shock when one of the characters uses profanity. Edward Lachman's camera tracks elegantly through Mark Friedberg's defiantly artificial sets, and the actors flawlessly adapt the style of the times to lines that never would have been spoken then, creating a fascinating frisson. When Frank unburdens himself to Cathy, draped almost completely in the shadows of their split-level living room, Quaid's voice reaches an anguished pitch, but his body remains almost perfectly erect, as if he's so trapped by the codes of masculine behavior he can't draw breath.

At times, Far from Heaven's carefully achieved style is almost counter-productive. The first time I saw the film, I recognized its achievements, but it was like trying to bite into wax fruit; the Sirk homage was so flawless it sucked the air right out of the room. Even after a second viewing, it's still a little more impressive than impassioned. The sophistication with which Haynes has intermingled the modern and postmodern is awe-inspiring, but you wonder if Far from Heaven will still be making them weep 50 years hence.