‘I’m sorry. I know it’s not normal but I can’t help it…’
Indie film director Todd Haynes. Hmm. I hated Velvet Goldmine, his shitty Bowie pastiche that wasted an incredibly talented cast. I never caught the Dylan biopic he did. I did enjoy Dark Waters a lot but that felt like a concerted move away from his indie roots. Safe was Haynes’ second feature film back in 1995, and while it’s bursting with great ideas, it also kind of trails off in the third act and is perhaps a little too ambiguous in what it was trying to say…
Carol White (Julianne Moore) is a typical suburban housewife. Bored with her humdrum life, her feelings of being trapped begin to manifest themselves as physical ailments. Despite the best efforts of her husband Greg (Xander Berkeley), Carol’s condition begins to deteriorate.
This was Julianne Moore’s first leading role in a feature film and boy does she grab that opportunity with both hands. She perfectly captures the feeling of existing but not living as both a bored homemaker and as a someone trapped in the cottage industry of self help. The central motif of the movie – which of those two prisons is preferable – is only made possible due to Moore’s ability to wring every ounce of emotion out of a character who speaks mainly in platitudes. Without her, Haynes’ opaque vision would be even more frustrating.
There are allusions here, not just to the self help craze and to bored housewives, but also to the AIDS epidemic and the health industry more generally, but Haynes never really succeeds in tying all these disparate elements together into something cohesive. That being said, Safe is gripping throughout and is a memorable film that is difficult to classify. Haynes himself prefers the tag ‘a horror movie for the soul’ and it’s hard to argue with that prognosis.
Safe is a curio yes, but one that deserves more recognition and more eyes on it than it has currently received.