The sense of period is botched in Todd Haynes' new movie, and all verisimilitude is lost. True, "Far from Heaven" has period flavor: it fairly screams period, never letting you forget for five minutes that it’s set in 1957. Not a single shot lacks some period indicator. But when a period is so overdone, it's badly done. In her superficially warm and unironic performance, which is so neutral as to lack any real emotional resonance, Julienne Moore never wears any outfit without those wide crinoline skirts – because that's what women wore in the Fifties, right? (Wrong. But teenage girls did). This is, frankly, a secondhand Fifties derived from film and TV (`Leave it to Beaver' and `Father Knows Best' come to mind). The family members sit at their little breakfast table as sitcom families do. In better off families (and `Mr. and Mrs. Magnatech,' in their kitsch way, are one of those) breakfast was served by the full time maid/cook at the dinner table.

In Todd Haynes' suburban Hartford, wives focus their time exclusively on the next big party or "do," and supporting the NAACP is a big, big stretch. Really? In Hartford, Connecticut? Everyone seems to be extraordinarily culturally impaired. Don't the Whitakers have any hobbies? Their daughter has ballet class, but their son has nothing to do but wonder why dad doesn't come home earlier. The constipated, cliché-ridden dialogue evokes stereotypes, but not real Fifties conversations. The Fifties were a lot more fun than this, and we know that. The characters in "Far from Heaven" inhabit a strange 1957 theme park in which they have nothing to do except act out their era's prejudices. Writer/director Haynes was born in 1961 and his sense of the period is second hand.

As the public presses have already made more than clear, some film buffs will love this movie, especially if they are familiar with the melodramas of Douglas Sirk and even more if they know that Fassbinder at times emulated Sirk. Interviews with the director are generously supplied in newspapers and magazines to inform those of us who are ignorant of these cinematic references. But one has to be suspicious of movies that require such explication to be fully enjoyed.

For that other group comprising persons who wouldn't have been caught dead going to Sirk's "Imitation of Life" or "All that Heaven Allows" or "Written on the Wind" but do happen to have been alive in the Fifties, "Far From Heaven" is an odd construct. It's too bad that contemporary American directors think this a period not to be approached without a travel guide, a costume consultant, and a complete file of every movie and TV show made in those years. If only they would lighten up a bit, it's not that hard a time to evoke.

The movie tells a grim story about a man with a great job and two kids who can't fight a reemerging homosexuality that wrecks his marriage, and an aggrieved wife who takes risky comfort from this upheaval in holding frank and increasingly intimate conversations with their black gardener. Mr. Whitaker (Dennis Quaid) implodes and explodes: one rarely sees an actor suffer so much. Since Quaid is known for macho roles, this is an interesting piece of casting. Julianne Moore as Mrs. W. never cracks. Her puffy curls aren't out of place, even when she's been boffed by her drunken, out of control spouse. Moore's performance isn't tongue-in-cheek, just utterly deadpan. Quaid is embarrasingly overwrought; Moore is like an animated Barbie doll.

The story takes us to some interesting places: a downtown movie gay cruising area, a members-only gay bar, a black restaurant that allows a white women in, but just barely. Why does the `Negro' gardener, Raymond Deagan (Dennis Haysbert) tell her this black restaurant is `a very friendly place'? Because he's living, as she unconsciously is, with an idealistic fantasy. Not many of us who lived in those days had such fantasies. And not many of us who were white and middle class in 1957 went to such places as these, either.

However "Fifties" deco some houses of the Fifties were inside (though precious few were, if the families in them had lived in previous decades, or inherited furniture from their parents), the world outside in the real Fifties looked different from the streets in this movie where we see only people costumed like the Whitakers, driving perfectly restored versions of big bright colored circa 1957 American cars. In the real streets of the Fifties, there were old cars, black cars, beat-up cars. Older people wore clothes from the Forties, and poor people wore whatever they could get their hands on. Real life, at any time, is not a theme park. ( Is Haynes not interested in referencing reality? Then how can he be saying anything about our times, either?)

Haynes has chosen to talk about matters Sirk's Fifties movies couldn't deal with so explicitly, but in doing so he has created a story and a sequence of events as lurid and as far fetched as something by Samuel Fuller. Unlike Fuller, however, he has no dramatic conclusion to his scenario, no comeuppance for the characters other than Mr. and Mrs. Whitaker's impending divorce and Raymond Deagan's departure for Baltimore. This movie's world is as oppressive and claustrophobic as the world of Haynes' "Safe," but unlike "Safe," it's without any internal logic. The movie ends not with a bang but a whimper. If overwrought cinematography made a film, the lovingly photographed railway station farewell between Mrs. Whitaker and Deagan might be a satisfying ending. But it's only a Forties moment, to end a hyper-Fifties movie.

It's true that `Far From Heaven' has some emotionally involving scenes when the focus is on Frank Whitaker's torments over sexual identity and Cathy's shock at how her world is falling apart. But they, and their children, and their friends, and the too-sensitive, too-restrained gardener are all stereotypes, without any perceptible inner life. Let's hope that some of even the most cinematically sophisticated members of the audience will see through this false and manipulative piece of stylized filmmaking. There is no fun here, not one smile to be had. Let us not walk out congratulating ourselves for such an experience. This is turning out to be the most overrated film of the year.