Criterion Collection: Safe | Blu-Ray Review

Todd Haynes receives his first entry in the Criterion collection with a beautiful restoration of his landmark 1995 sophomore feature, Safe, the film that launched the status of burgeoning star Julianne Moore. Though initial reactions to the film were perplexing after a premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, a growing cult following cemented the film’s reputation as a fascinating example of Haynes’ remarkable control of mise en scene, as well as a deliberately refined AIDs allegory ahead of its time. Recuperated famously as a case study as pertains to practices and definitions of whiteness, it may very well be Haynes’ most invigorating work precisely because of all the avenues of projection its fascinating obliqueness provides.

The narrative is relatively simple, especially as pertains to the work of Haynes, who often prizes experimental, non-linear narratives. A suburban housewife residing in the San Fernando Valley of 1987, Carol White (Julianne Moore) finds herself succumbing to an illness that her doctor (Steven Gilborn) seems unable to detect. Though her husband (Xander Berkeley) and close friends (Susan Norman) don’t really seem to believe Carol’s increasing ailments, it begins to seem that the very environment in which she resides is choking the life out of her. Exhaust on the freeway causes a violent choking fit, birthday cake at a baby shower exacerbates a panic attack, a perm causes a nose bleed, and fumigation at the dry cleaner’s causes a seizure. Finally, at the end of her rope, Carol sees an ad for Wrenwood Institute, a retreat and healing center for those suffering from what’s coming to be known as environmental illness.

With all its foreboding and atmosphere of delightful dread, many have referred to Safe as a domestic horror film as well as an examination of self-help culture and class based social problems that have mutated into manifestations of the physical. Opening with its ambient electronic score from Ed Tomney, our perspective is that of a car driving home in the dark, replete with all the crashing dread of something like Gerald Kargl’s Angst (1983). Stepping out of the car on the passenger side we get out first white glimpse of Ms. White, a prescient sneeze preceding her dialogue, a complaint about the temperature. We come to find that Carol is mostly a non-entity of a person, a blank, white slate without an identity of her own. She’s like a handicapped child, unable even to pour herself a glass of milk, her preferred drink, gratingly begging the housekeeper, Flavia, to allow her to have some.

Carol White is an aggravating personality, as evidenced by how all those around her handle her passivity—with barely concealed annoyance. When she tries to exert any agency, it’s through denying her husband sex, claiming she has a headache. The turmoil that ensues in Carol’s life plays like a direct, mutated homage of the famed Charlotte Perkins Gilman short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which concerns a locked up housewife, writing in her journal that she hides from her husband as she recovers from a nervous breakdown. Color coding is important to Haynes, just as Carol’s position is within Alex Nepomniaschy’s expert framing. Yellow roses get a close-up, but it’s a therapy exercise shared with fellow Wrenwood resident Jessica Harper that forces Moore to recall a room from her childhood. She’s only able to remember that it had yellow wallpaper.

Disc Review

Criterion’s 4K digital restoration of Safe is a fantastic recuperation of a title long languished in out of print status. There are several nifty extra features, including a reunion of Haynes and Moore, who have now done three features together, but soundtrack and a 1.85:1 aspect ratio really enhance the quality of the title. Every single frame of Safe is coded with details meant to enhance the many ways with which to interpret the film’s various layers. Poignant, confounding, and delightful, the film is as equally a visual and aural masterpiece as it is a narrative allegory.

Todd Haynes & Julianne Moore
A thirty six minute feature finds Moore and Haynes reuniting in 2014 to discuss their work on Safe, now twenty years ago. Clearly, both artists hold each other in high esteem and it’s fascinating to hear their approaches to making the film.

Christine Vachon
A sixteen minute interview with Haynes’ producer Christine Vachon is also not to miss since she discusses and outlines the cultural attitudes of the era which caused an initial backlash with the title from queer audiences.

The Suicide
Haynes’ first short film from 1978 is included here, a film the director thought long lost. At twenty two minutes, the film concerns a bullied middle school child and reflects the sensibilities that Haynes would return to in his 1991 debut, Poison.

Final Thoughts

Just as Haynes would reinvent the tropes of Sirkian melodrama with 2002’s Far From Heaven, here he is playing with ideologies of the women’s picture, the haunted hysteria motif that defined decades of female literary characters. Carol is only able to explore an identity through illness, invented or not—in her own “normal” and very white, privileged arena, Carol White is not a person actually privileged. In retrospect, Moore’s presence also recalls the specter of Virginia Woolf, thanks to her memorable role in Stephen Daldry’s 2002 film The Hours. In Woolf’s essay “On Being Ill,” she writes “illness often takes on the disguise of love, and plays the same odd tricks.” Through her illness, Carol is, for the first time, experiencing a sort of rudimentary introduction to acting out emotions. But when confronted, she’s only able to garble a re-hash of whatever she’s absorbed.

The incredibly poignant final frames, where we see Carol speaking directly to herself (but really, us) in the mirror, parroting the same moment that had been earlier relayed to her by another character, she is in shadow, not quite clear, the outline of her face morphed in the dusk as she quietly announces “I love you.” It isn’t a happy ending, but an even more damning one, because Carol White, a being without shape because her entire life was shaped by the habits, the non-definable culture of whiteness, will always be a merely a projection of others. It is one of Julianne Moore’s most rewarding and definitive performances, the first of two very distinct unions with Haynes, a director who will soon be premiering his next ‘woman’s picture’ about a very different kind of Carol (2015).

Film: ★★★★½/☆☆☆☆☆
Disc: ★★★★★/☆☆☆☆☆