Newsnight Review discussed Julianne Moore in Far From Heaven.

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(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

IAN HISLOP:
It's beautifully shot and the colours are amazing, but then I felt a bit "so what" by the end. Julianne Moore is very good at being miserable and beautiful, and she did both in two films. In this film, everything was mild. There was racism, but quite mild. There was homosexuality, but quite mild. Everything sort of went along and then it ended, and she was quite sad. It's perfectly well done and perfectly miserable in a rather beautiful way, but I couldn't really see the point of doing it. That's the trouble with homage and tributes. You think, "They did it better, why don't you do something else?"

MARK KERMODE:
On the subject of Julianne Moore's journey, the key to it is Haynes is interested in the way in which women are trapped by society. One of the first things he ever did was Superstar - The Karen Carpenter Story, which was her story being told with animated Barbie dolls being carved away. Unfortunately it was banned because the Carpenter estate and Mattel said 'you can't do this.' It was a very political work. After that he made Safe, where Julianne Moore played a privileged woman whose life is so antiseptic that she becomes anaesthetised and allergic to the world. In this film, you find a woman finding herself on the bottom of the social ladder, even below the black characters. She is a privileged white woman but with no social power. Even with all the sub-text, it was an emotional joy to watch. I didn't think the story was small at all. In the tradition of melodramas in which small actions have huge emotional impact. I was completely wrapped up in her performance, I think she ought to win an Oscar for this and for Safe.

GERMAINE GREER:
I am feeling a bit ungenerous about this film. I was alive in the '50s - unique in this company, I think - and it was real. We were as complicated as people are now. It was rather odd to me to see that Mr and Mrs Magnatec, or whatever they are called, were being presented as one-dimensional people. He turned out to have a secret. She turned out to have none. Very strange!

LAWSON:
But also they deliberately tell us very little. There is a scene where the women are discussing their sex lives and she doesn't say anything. It's an odd decision that. We know nothing about her.

GREER:
What we girls could tell you is that she ain't made love at all for years and years and years. That's what that's about. It wasn't subtle, this film, for goodness sake! It was extraordinary, every time she stepped out into the garden to have a private cry, out of the shrubbery came the black man, the noble savage, who was going to make it all OK. The thing about him is that he is totally solid and true, and good, and you could cut him all the way down and still get the same grain. What is her next possibility? That she will transfer from her husband, who was a rock she should never have built on, to this other rock that keeps emerging from the shrubbery. You keep thinking, "Come on." Even then, you didn't go from one mistake to another mistake in quite such a blind way. But the interesting thing about the character is that she is so dinky-die, so Pollyanna. When I think about it, I do have friends who are just that Pollyanna.

LAWSON:
She represents an ideal. I thought the recreation of the language, which is the 'jiminy', for example, and 'jeepers' and the amount everyone drinks, they had a bar in the house, which I think everyone did, and then getting into cars. That social detail was convincing.

KERMODE:
All the way through, it treads a very thin line between a serious homage, in inverted commas. But what holds it together is Julianne Moore, who is performing both the facade you are talking about - which in a David Lynch film there would be all sorts of filth underneath. But she never lets the facade drop. You see someone in a state of total emotional anguish and turmoil. The point is not that she has to transfer her emotion, but the fact not that she has to but that she has no option. By doing very little she portrayed an enormous amount of repression. The inverted commas are always there, but it doesn't mean they are not sincere.