Featured attraction
Moore gives one of the year's great performances—subtle, lingeringly rich—in director Todd Haynes's peculiar revisionist homage to old Hollywood women's pictures. Moore plays a housewife whose late—'50s suburban life collapses after her businessman husband (Quaid) announces he's a homosexual. Then she falls in love with her black gardener (Dennis Haysbert). Moore creates a fragile outer shell, an archly iconic '50s identity (perfect hair, eager smile), and beneath that fleshes out every gradation of feeling as this woman achieves a self-knowledge shot through with pain and elation. It's not clear what Haynes—who borrows not only plot but set design and camera work from director Douglas Sirk's Technicolor melodrama All That Heaven Allows—accomplishes by making explicit themes Sirk couldn't touch in 1955. Even now, the clueless wife with a closeted spouse isn't an extinct species. But Moore is not to be missed. (PG-13)
Bottom Line: An actress close to perfect
