+4/4 Review: Roger Ebert [November 15, 2002]
+ Review: NY Times [A.O. Scott, Nov. 8, 2002]

Roger Ebert's review nicely sums it up: "Far from Heaven" is like the best and bravest movie of 1957. Its themes, values and style faithfully reflect the social melodramas of the 1950s, but it's bolder, and says out loud what those films only hinted at. It begins with an ideal suburban Connecticut family, a husband and wife "team" so thoroughly absorbed into corporate culture they're known as "Mr. and Mrs. Magnatech." Then it develops that Mr. Magnatech is gay, and Mrs. Magnatech believes that the black gardener is the most beautiful man she has ever seen. [Roger Ebert]

I grew up in a small suburban village not unlike the Hartford Connecticut depicted in the film, but my family was distinctly lower middle class, while the family in the film is high-middle class. We had no servants, and were not members of the country club. The village had one black family who ran the local junk yard. They had no young school-age children. There were at least ten Protestant chirches, one Roman Catholic church. No Jews, and one Morman family who eventually moved away. We were all bigots, including especially my family. I was sure I was the only Queer teenager (although I had no self-identity name for it). When my parents dropped me off at a college 400 miles away (affordable only because of a scholarship), I was embraced by a joyous feeling of freedom, of liberation; but I knew not of what or from.