Artificial flowering

Sometimes in the movies, the best way to get at the truth is by getting false. In a world where massive steel skyscrapers can crumble to dust in seconds, and demented snipers use innocent mall-shoppers for target practice, our sense of the normal parameters of reality grows shakier by the day. Maybe that’s partly why three of this fall’s most memorable films -- “Secretary,” “Punch-Drunk Love” and “Far From Heaven” -- are able to plumb deeper emotional and cultural realities by putting their trust in the artificial, the stylized and the hyper-real.

Each of these movies briefly masquerades as something that it’s not. For a while they half-lull us into believing we’re watching a wistful romantic comedy (“Punch-Drunk Love”), a kinky psychodrama (“Secretary”) or a period melodrama a la “Peyton Place” with no more substance than a Kleenex (“Far From Heaven”).

Then the veils fly off, the filters lift, and they wallop us with the disclosure of a husband’s closeted homosexuality, a town’s covert racism, a mousy secretary’s secret penchant for S&M; or a nebbishy San Fernando Valley salesman’s pent-up desires. They jar us by showing what was previously concealed beneath the contrivances and conventions of cinematic genre. It’s as if the directors had given us X-ray glasses and we were finally able to see into the souls of the characters and behind the placid, quotidian surfaces of the worlds they inhabit.

Unlike so many of their Hollywood peers, directors Steven Shainberg (“Secretary”), Paul Thomas Anderson (“Punch-Drunk Love”) and Todd Haynes (“Far From Heaven”) clearly aren’t afraid to bend the rules and play against audience expectation. All three directors are acquired tastes, and tapping into their wavelengths can be a challenge. But this may be in part the result of a shift in American movies over the past 30 years.

From the late ‘60s to the middle ‘70s, gritty urban naturalism was the default mode of much serious Hollywood filmmaking. Watching movies like “Midnight Cowboy,” “Taxi Driver,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” “Klute” and “The French Connection,” audiences were meant to feel as if they were really prowling Manhattan’s fetid sidewalks alongside Jon Voight’s Joe Buck or Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle.

Today, the default mode of many serious Hollywood films is artifice and surrealism, a change that, though gradual, seems to have caught audiences slightly off guard. For viewers conditioned by pop culture standards of what constitutes psychological naturalism and social realism, the characters may seem too stiff, formalized or just plain weird to be credible. But asking why the people in “Secretary” or “Punch-Drunk Love” don’t behave like case studies in some self-help bestseller is like asking why Picasso painted one half of a woman’s face red and the other blue. The simple answer is that in art sometimes the mask, the makeup, is more expressive and revealing than what’s underneath it.

“It’s all smoke and mirrors. You should see her before she gets her face on,” says Dennis Quaid’s character in “Far From Heaven” when a party guest asks how his wife (Julianne Moore) manages to juggle her various matronly duties. It’s a snide remark, made by a half-sloshed ad executive struggling to keep his life from going to pieces.

But in the context of the movie’s preoccupation with surface versus substance, Quaid’s retort is right on target. Moore’s suburban Hartford housewife is a woman so outwardly unruffled that she might be a Montgomery Ward mannequin. A product of her times, she’s been put together with as much sturdy good sense and color-coordinated good taste as her ‘50s-modern living room furniture.

“Far From Heaven” invites -- no, forces -- us to see beyond this seamless surface, to ask who is this woman leading a doll’s-house existence in the explosive period of Joe McCarthy, Rosa Parks and the atomic bomb. And who is her husband, imprisoned in the psychological norms (i.e. the “reality”) of the day, which regarded homosexuality as a mental illness requiring electroshock therapy?

Constraints are key

Film, essentially a realistic medium, has flip-flopped throughout its history between the desire to capture “ordinary” life and the urge to manipulate what the camera and the audience see.

Today, weaned on self-conscious irony in everything from pop songs to advertisements, and inundated with real-life events so bizarre as to strain comprehension, we are gradually (re-)turning to directors able to express their ideas through a more mannered mode of acting and character representation, a more stylized and expressionistic sense of design.

But “Secretary,” “Punch-Drunk Love” and “Far From Heaven” show that artificiality needn’t have an emotional impact only above the neck. In fact, it’s the formal constraints in these movies that make the emotions go “Pop!” Fakeness makes these films more emotionally transparent by throwing their honesty into relief.

For some viewers, that distancing effect may be disconcerting. Can the meek girl Friday played by Maggie Gyllenhaal in “Secretary” really be submitting with a mischievous smirk to a vicious spanking from her anal-retentive boss (James Spader)? In “Punch-Drunk Love,” can Adam Sandler’s character really be cooing to the mystery woman played by Emily Watson that he longs to smash her face in, as they lie entwined in a tender lovers’ embrace?

Yet in each film the director signals us that we’re not supposed to be taking these characters and their predicaments at simple face value. Both movies unspool in self-contained, looking-glass worlds where there’s little awareness of outside events, allowing both to maintain a hermetic seal of illusion.

In “Secretary,” the skewed camera angles, bizarre decor of Spader’s office suite and hairpin turns of dialogue announce that we’re not watching some literal-minded “Oprah” confessional about people who get their kicks by slapping each other around. The ritualized S&M; in “Secretary” is a screen through which we come to understand how two off-kilter human beings find a way to connect with each other.

Similarly, “Punch-Drunk Love” presents us with a kind of false front, a soft-focus romantic sheen that cracks in the first few minutes of the film when, for no obvious reason, an SUV spins out of control and explodes on a quiet suburban street. Moments later, a cab stops and an anonymous occupant deposits a Melodeon in the middle of the road, while our unlikely hero, Barry Egan (Sandler), looks on blankly. Already, we know we’re not going to be watching “Sleepless in the San Fernando Valley.” “Punch-Drunk Love” upends and demolishes the conventions of the Hollywood romantic comedy as surely as it does that SUV.

If “Punch-Drunk Love” feels practically like an entire new genre, “Far From Heaven” brilliantly refashions an old one: the melodrama. One of the film’s small miracles, apart from its stars’ exquisitely calibrated performances, is that it finds wrenching emotional credibility in what at first blush seems patently unreal. Director Haynes, who once made a movie about pop star Karen Carpenter using Barbie dolls as body doubles, knows what truths artifice can reveal. By cloaking his film in alluring ornamentation, he draws attention to the emotional longings buried below the surface.

Much critical ink has been spent in the last few weeks noting Haynes’ indebtedness to Douglas Sirk (ne Detlef Sierck), the German-Danish director who later migrated to Hollywood. In films like “All That Heaven Allows” and “Imitation of Life,” Sirk pulled the rug out from under the representational cliches of the classic Hollywood melodrama, with its gushy notions of male and female behavior and one-size-fits-all morality, to show the sexual and social turmoil coursing through Eisenhower’s America.

“Far From Heaven” is an obvious Sirk homage, but perhaps another antecedent is the neo-Mannerist art that brought up the rear of the High Renaissance. With figures that had pale, translucent skin and stiffly contorted postures, and by using “shot” colors that blend into each other, Mannerism sought to express a broad palette of human emotion, to grab spectators by the throat. (In the movie’s press kit, Haynes says he hopes audiences will respond to “Far From Heaven” with “tears of recognition -- where the heightened stylistic experience only clarifies how much, in this all-too-human story, we recognize ourselves.”)

Mannerism also openly and self-consciously flouted the visual and intellectual conventions of its day and, as the Penguin Dictionary of Art and Artists states, it “presupposed an educated spectator; otherwise there is no point in breaking the rules.”

Haynes, Anderson and Shainberg seem to credit their audiences with intelligence and a basic knowledge of film history. But perhaps more importantly, they trust them to be able to see beyond the obvious, to approach movies not as jaded popcorn munchers but as people who come to the theater with their eyes and hearts open, hoping maybe to experience something unexpected and intense.

As happens in fairy tales, it is, finally, the pure-of-heart in these three movies who engage our thoughts and feelings most fully, who overcome enormous odds and who find, if not happiness, then at least a better version of truth than the one they’d subscribed to before. “Do you think we ever really do see beyond the surface of things?” Julianne Moore’s distressed Cathy Whitaker asks her friend Raymond (Dennis Haysbert) in “Far From Heaven.”

“Yes, I do,” replies the African American gardener. “I don’t really have a choice.”

We don’t really have a choice either. So we’re lucky to have filmmakers among us who can see that “reality” isn’t always as genuine as it appears to be.

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Tapping into the truth

Artificiality in film has taken many different forms, from German Expressionism to MGM musicals. Here are a few well-known movies that employ stylization and exaggeration to tap a deeper vein of psychological, cultural or moral truth.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919): German Expressionist classic that used skewed, claustrophobic sets and other creepy effects to convey a madman’s point of view.

Contempt (1963): Director Jean-Luc Godard invoked Greek mythology and tweaked Hollywood in his self-conscious, multilayered satire of filmmaking.

Blue Velvet (1986): A hyper-real quality suffused characters and sets in David Lynch’s dark comic thriller of small-town life.

American Beauty (1999): Surreal fantasy sequences and exaggerated emotions enlivened Sam Mendes’ take on contemporary suburbia.