Far from Heaven is, in a way, both the most mainstream and the most experimental film Todd Haynes has ever made. Drawing heavily on the oeuvre of Douglas Sirk, the German expatriate known for his brightly colored Hollywood melodramas, Far from Heaven is a dead ringer for Sirk’s Imitation of Life or All That Heaven Allows, to the extent that multiplex-goers might be forgiven for thinking they’ve walked into the wrong theater. On the other hand, though, Far from Heaven brings to the surface concerns that Sirk could only hint at: homosexuality, racism and the crushing effect of social rules on individuals. In essence, Haynes uses a familiar form and period setting to lull viewers into a sense of safety, and then challenges them with the idea that far less has changed in the last 50 years than we’d ever care to admit.

Haynes' choice of the melodrama was, he says, as much about confrontation as comfort. He points out that he's hardly the only director to draw inspiration from the period, but that most filmmakers opt for the mined-clean noir genre. "That kind of generic film noir," he says without naming names, "is a safe way to have the kind of classiness reflecting a previous, outmoded style, but never endangering an audience's feeling of security. But in this case, [the genre] is so inherently dangerous. We are so guarded about emotional susceptibility, and [melodrama] is the mother-lode genre for emotional display and excess, the possible place for tremendous feelings of embarrassment." He laughs briefly over the phone: "It's definitely a slightly ludicrous choice."

In Far from Heaven's 1950s Hartford, appearance is all, so Haynes and his crew labored to create the kind of idealized on-screen world that told '50s audiences how to think and feel, only to slowly chip away at its edges. The process had its obsessive aspects: "We would have meetings that would go on for days, just about color," Haynes says. "I had all these color charts that I'd made, swatches of color for every scene in the movie, a way of communicating where I was going emotionally."

The result is a surface that's almost distractingly attractive, a direct inspiration from Sirk, Haynes says. "It's something one can't help but think about when one sees their first Sirk film -- those interiors, those surfaces seem so overladen with information, just crowding these people's lives. They're claustrophobic and overdetermined and oppressive. But it's almost like a circle. You start by talking about an obviously intense, colorful, rich, if not overrich, overperfect surface, and then you try to look at what's underneath that -- maybe people wanting something different from their lives, something those surfaces keep fighting. But at a certain point, I almost think you go back to the surface. There's something really direct about emotional themes in these films. They're sort of pre-psychological. The characters in the Sirk films, their realizations are very much on the surface. They're very much dealing with the quite apparent constraints of their society, and making quite apparent and overt decisions that usually mean depriving themselves of something that would make them very happy."

Factored into Haynes' understanding of the "weepie" is the idea that old-fashioned "problem pictures," with their focus on social ills and external conditions, can actually be more radical than movies focused on the subjective reality of a single character, and that high style can provide a more direct line to the emotions than default naturalism and Method mumbling. His voice rises with the indignity of the true aesthete as he bemoans the lack of thoughtfulness in contemporary moviemaking. "On the one hand, contemporary movies are too much in love with contemporary reality, and on the other, that's only concealing how movies are increasingly dumb, just dumbed down -- in their resolutions, and in their totally heroic, reductive, sort of silly conclusions, the way characters always have to overcome their problems. The happy ending, the resolve that Hollywood studios mask into the redemptive ending, is about as adolescent as films have ever been."

Far from Heaven's visual surfaces are impossible to ignore, but the subtleties of its performances may take longer to sink in. While adopting the cadence and posture of actors of the time, the cast -- most notably Julianne Moore, Dennis Haysbert, Dennis Quaid and Patricia Clarkson -- nimbly keep on the right side of the line between homage and parody. While viewers will no doubt bring their own attitudes into the theater, there's no smirk in Haynes' direction. "It's not overly theatrical," Haynes says, "it's not funny, it's not campy. The '50s were characterized by a real formality that's not familiar today. And you have to remember what these movies were doing: They were teaching people how to act."

Surprisingly, both Haynes and his actors say the style came easily. "The actors didn't need a lot of fussing by me," Haynes explains. "We talked a lot about it at the beginning, and did discuss a kind of cleanness and simplicity in gesture and in movement that was more typical of acting from that time, rather than the kind of muddying-up of dialogue and scratching your face and throwing things away and humming and hawing that we think of as naturalistic today. A lot of what's happening to these characters is on the surface. That's really hard for actors to trust today. It takes really secure actors."

During a roundtable at the Toronto International Film Festival, Moore echoed Haynes' account. "When you grow up in the U.S., you turn on the TV Saturday afternoon and you're going to see something like Imitation of Life. So without being aware of it, you're inculcated with this kind of acting style. Todd gave us all these movies he'd reference, things we hadn't seen, and I kept them in my trailer, because I thought maybe I'd reference them. But I didn't! Once we started the ball rolling, it was just present in the script, and we went with it."

None of this would matter if Far from Heaven turned out to be some kind of film school in-joke, but Haynes is too exacting a filmmaker to let the device run away with the film. "It was always our feeling, as a whole company, to make the emotional themes eventually win out over the stylistic conceit of the movie, and with faith and hard work, have the stylistic elements support and fill in the emotional themes." Fortunately, Haynes says, even "very mainstream press" have shied away from the implication that the movie's crises are all in the past. "These themes are relevant, in ways maybe we don't even think they are when we go into a movie set in the '50s. Besides, have you seen the election results? I feel like the '50s are looking more radical every day."