The Good Thief
15, 108mins

TODD HAYNES’S Far From Heaven is a costume drama about skewed Fifties American mores. Julianne Moore plays Cathy, a Connecticut housewife with immaculately curled golden hair, tippety-tappety shoes and skirts you could twirl yourself to death in.

Haynes has said that he based Far from Heaven in part on Douglas Sirk’s “social melodrama” movies of the Fifties, in particular All That Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life, and you can see this in the flawed iconography of Cathy. She is Doris Day’s even-more-perfect older sister, a woman born, bred and plumped up fit to burst on homespun wisdom and good old apple pie. Only Cathy is different from most of her peers in a very important way — she is not narrow-minded. Indeed, where civil liberties are concerned, Cathy has a daringly liberal undercurrent swishing away somewhere in the net underskirts of her subconscious.

In fact, Cathy is not a million miles away from the character Moore plays in The Hours, the difference being that the character in The Hours was inwardly choking to death on the horror and mundanity of her perfect existence. By contrast, Cathy loves everything about her life: her big, smart house, her two cute children, her husband Frank (Dennis Quaid), who is a leading sales executive at the local company Magnatech, and her stylish best friend, Eleanor (Patricia Clarkson).

Cathy, you feel, gets a big kick every time she pulls her little white gloves on to her beautiful pale hands, pops a chic hat on her head, and goes tippety-tappety down to the stores. Indeed, Cathy the Happy Homemaker is such a Fifties success story that a society magazine runs a story on her at home, the journalist gushing about how Cathy and Frank are viewed as “Mr and Mrs Magnatech”.

It is while talking to this journalist that Cathy notices a strange black man in her garden and rushes out to confront him. He is Raymond (Dennis Haysbert), the son of her previous gardener, recently deceased. Full of apologies and condolences, Cathy unthinkingly reaches out to touch him. When the journalist writes her story, she speaks glowingly about how Cathy is “a friend to Negroes”.

Shortly after that, Cathy’s life starts to unravel. First, she catches her husband in a gay clinch. Frank tries to “beat his problem” but he can’t, and resorts to trying to drink away his self-disgust. Meanwhile, Cathy, having grown platonically close to the kindly, urbane Raymond, gains a reputation for being a woman who is rather too “friendly to Negroes”. In a perfectly pitched scene, Frank, the alcoholic closet homosexual on the verge of losing his job, rails at her about the shame she has bought on the family. At one point, he strikes her. Ever the perfect spouse, Cathy merely bows her head and politely asks for ice.

Far From Heaven doesn’t just echo Fifties cinema, it is soaked in it, from the Sirk-esque “forbidden fruit” story structures and clipped, breathy dialogue, through to Ed Lachman’s lush Technicolor visuals and Elmer Bernstein’s soaring score. When Cathy drives her car it even looks unconvincing, the scenery bumping along in the back window, just like it did in Fifties movies.

The best thing is that everyone clearly loved the novelty of doing things the old-fashioned way. I bet Moore relished having to recoil in horror from Quaid’s slap (how Babs Stanwyck!) and I bet Quaid enjoyed giving it to her (he hasn’t had such a good role in years).

For his part, Haysbert’s Raymond seems more of a figure of convenience, a Kind Black Man who is only around to show what a Kind White Lady Cathy is (there is also a Kind Black Lady in the shape of a, natch, maid).

Even though Raymond and Cathy never consummate their relationship (it is an ethical romance, a benign “us against the bigots” coupling), it still tramples over the corns of what was acceptable at the time. We are left in no doubt that both sides, black and white, are against the couple’s harmless affection for each other. Indeed, set against Quaid’s helpless homosexuality, the inter-racial non-romance is shown as by far the greater “sin”, although both are indicative of the triumphantly frigid American mindset of the time. A pleasant surprise all round, then. The danger was always that Haynes would try so hard to make a Fifties movie that he would forget to make a movie. However, with a classic storytelling style bordering on corniness, a deft tragicomic touch and a heroic refusal to use the safety net of irony, Haynes has managed to produce something of a gem.

On some levels, Neil Jordan’s new movie, The Good Thief, is a welcome return to form. On others, it’s under-par. An approximate remake of the Jean-Pierre Melville 1955 French classic, Bob le Flambeur, it tells the tale of Bob (Nick Nolte), a washed-up gambler and drug addict who, along with his gang of reprobates (including a transsexual safe blower, an over-excitable would-be gangsta and the obligatory teenage prostitute), plans one last cheeky heist from a Monte Carlo casino.

It is good to revisit Jordan’s unsentimental European visuals, his unapologetic intelligence and flair for invention (horses racing in balletic synchronicity; Ralph Fiennes popping up unannounced). However, it’s less pleasant to have to sit through loads of philosophical drivel (everyone talks as if they’re uttering their last words on earth); the rushed, fudged ending; the countless freeze-frames and fuzzings-up (if this were a telly you’d be thumping it).

The Good Thief is worth seeing, if only for Nolte’s turn as the loveable de-toxing rogue. Nolte roams through the movie like Howard Marx on a sleepy-eyed bender that few would be churlish enough to interrupt. If it really is meant as a dig at slick, corporate heist movies such as Oceans 11, all power to it, but you’d still rather be watching Jordan classics such as Mona Lisa or The Crying Game.

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