Sony Classics (Good Machine production)

It took Todd Haynes four years after "Poison," which won the top Sundance award in 2001, to get funding for "Safe," an emotionally devastating portrait of insulated domesticity, centering on Carol White (Julianne Moore), a San Fernando housewife who develops peculiar health problems. Carol's immune system is compromised by an "environmental illness," an all-encompassing allergy to chemicals that has baffled the medical establishment and gained the moniker "20th Century Disease." Helpless, she turns to a self-help organization that leads to greater isolation from the real outside world.

A seductive entry into Carol's bourgeois milieu opens the film, with the camera tracking a hill populated with houses that get increasingly larger and simulated in their design. This sequence was influenced by Haynes' childhood in Encino, where architecture was "frightening--fake Tudor, fake country manor." He also looked at films depicting L.A. as a futuristic city, where every trace of nature has been superseded by humans. For Haynes, L.A. is like an airport, "because you never breathe real air, you're never in any real place. You're in a transitional, carpeted hum zone."

Conventional cinematic cues that usually tell viewers how to respond are avoided. Safe breaks the Hollywood mold by not using close-ups and other audience-controlling devices. The film minimizes manipulation, letting the viewers make up their own minds through subjective perceptions. Haynes refuses to judge his characters or subject them to the ridicule to which a mainstream film would resort.

Indeed, the film's subtlety was mistaken by some viewers as endorsement of dubious fads, as if promoting New Age philosophies and places like Wrenwood, the "Wellness Center." In actuality, the film is critical of New Age therapies, perceiving them as a trap no better than the mindless materialism that defined Carol's life. Arguably, the film is more of an indictment of New Age medicine than of California's bourgeois lifestyle. The chilling conclusion shows how Carol's self-imposed exile is carried to an extreme. Standing in front of a mirror, with a blank expression on her face, Carol says repeatedly, "I like you."

Haynes' challenge was to overcome the gap between himself and Carol, who could become an easy target for criticism--her bourgeois class, her lack of self-knowledge. The same evenhanded approach was taken with the New Age characters: "I wanted to challenge my own innate criticism of their worlds, I had no interest in condemning them or placing myself above them." At the same time, Haynes didn't want Carol to become too attractive, or larger-than-life character she would have in a Hollywood movie. Haynes dissects Carol's identity, her incessant need to be affirmed by society. He wanted Carol to evoke the vulnerable, fractured nature of modern identities, an issue American films rarely address. Identity formation, and how it is manipulated by larger social forces, are subtley explored.

Like many other women, Carol never masters the ability to break out. "L.A. and Wrenwood both have isolation built into them, but both are telling you you're not alone, and if you do these things, you'll be affirmed as part of the group." Safe shows the cost entailed in "joining a group or giving up things in ourselves that can never be harnessed." Though refusing to indulge in a sappy style, Safe belongs to the tradition of "the woman's film", drawing on the melodramas of Douglas Sirk and Fassbinder. Haynes uses the melodramatic format to place limits on his narrative: "Carol is somebody enclosed in certain systems, whether it's L.A. or another system."

The irony and measured rhythms of Safe are exquisite yet austere, conveyed through the anesthetic suburban spaces through which Carol moves: grand "living" rooms, cavernous car parks, clotted freeways, spotless spas. From the first scene, featuring the husband's selfish "lovemaking" to which Carol dutifully submits, Haynes chronicles Carol's increasing loss of control in her desperate efforts to conform: the Bride of Frankenstein perm she receives, the fruit diet embraced on a friend's recommendation. As Safe's silence is disrupted by technological sounds--vacuum cleaner, television, radio station's call-in--Carol's identity undergoes shutdown. "Who am I" she wonders with quiet desperation.

Carol fits the outline of Haynes's earlier protagonists, mostly victims: Shaped by her environment, paddled by patriarchs, she belongs to his series of plastic dolls. Is Carol herself the problem: a humorless Stepford wife, honed by aerobic drill instruction, looking like an emaciated replicant, a luminous pod, never breaking a sweat Shot by Alex Nepomniaschy in wide angle that reduces all human activity to miniaturized doll-movements, Safe is steeped in paranoia and malaise.

Safe plays on the "comfort and resolve" (Haynes's words) of the TV movie-of-the-week, quietly subverting the rhetoric of recovery guru Peter Dunning, a "chemically sensitive person with AIDS," to whom Carol turns for help at the Wrenwood retreat. In one scene, Carol, looking more haggard than ever-supposedly "adjusting" to Wrenwood--is approached by Peter who's concerned over her reluctance to join in group-think. Eager to fit in, Carol admits she's "still just learning the words." Peter sighs, "words are just the way we get to what's true," turning what she's said into an essentialist statement. For Haynes, "words show you how truth is unobtainable, because you can never articulate it."

By insisting on pride (which equals self-blame), Dunning allows his patients to fall, while his "therapeutic success" allows him--as the image of his majestic villa high on a hillside--to ascend. Haynes wanted to examine the New Age philosophies of Louise Hay, self-help author of You Can Heal Your Life, which led to upsurge of similar treatments among gay men with AIDS. "What is it about these philosophies that make the sufferer of incurable illnesses feel more at peace Why do we choose culpability over chaos" It's a tribute to Safe's complexity and subtlety that it doesn't provide answers to these absorbing questions. If you want to know more about this issue, please read my book, Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of American Independent Film (NYU Press, paperback 2001).

Cast

Carol White (Julianne Moore)

Greg White (Xander Berkeley)

Peter Dunning (Peter Friedman)

Linda (Susan Norman)

Claire (Kate McGregory Stewart)

Nell (Mary Carver)

Dr. Hubbard (Steven Gilborn)

Dr. Reynolds (Peter Crombie)

Barabra (Ronnie Farer)

Crew

Produced by Christine Vachon and Lauren Zalaznick

Directed and written by Todd Haynes

Camera: Alex Nepomniaschy

Editor: James Lyons

Music: Ed Tomney

Production Design: David J. Bomba

Art direction: Anthony R. Stabley

Costumes: Nancy Steiner

Running time: 123 Minutes