Taglines: In the 21st century nobody will be…Safe.
Safe movie storyline. Safe has been described as a horror movie of the soul, a description that director Todd Haynes relishes. California housewife Carol White seems to have it all in life: a wealthy husband, a beautiful house, servants, beauty, and a lot of friends. The only thing she lacks is a strong personality: Carol seems timid and empty during all of her interactions with the world around her. At the beginning of the film, one would consider her to be more safe in life than just about anyone.
That doesn’t turn out to be the case. Starting with headaches and leading to a grandmal seizure, Carol becomes more and more sick, claiming that she’s become sensitive to the common toxins in today’s world: exhaust, fumes, aerosol spray, etc. She pulls back from the sexual advances of her husband and spends her nights alone by the TV or wandering around the outside of her well-protected home like an animal in a cage. Her physician examines her and can find nothing wrong.
Safe — sometimes written as [safe] or [SAFE] — is a 1995 British/American drama film written and directed by Todd Haynes, and starring Julianne Moore, Xander Berkeley, Dean Norris, Julie Burgess, Ronnie Farer, Jodie Markell, Susan Norman, Martha Velez, Chauncey Leopardi and Wendy Haynes.
The story is a character study of a suburban California housewife whose life deteriorates under the stress of “environmental illnesses” and seeks hope from “New Age” practitioners with whom she becomes involved. Safe was voted the best film of the 1990s in the 1999 Village Voice Film Poll. The film had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 25, 1995. Sony Pictures Classics acquired distribution rights to the film and released the film in a limited release on June 23, 1995.
Film Review for Safe
Living in a bubble of antiseptic privilege, Carol (Julianne Moore) is a stranger in a strange land. Her life is a string of hollow rituals and reflexive thoughts. Her big, clean house is eerily forbidding. Her uninteresting husband, Greg (Xander Berkeley), is barely there. Carol is much less excited by him than by delivery men who bring her a new sofa in a color she didn’t order.
Seen through the small end of Todd Haynes’s telescope in his elegantly unnerving “Safe,” Carol begins showing symptoms of a peculiar malaise. And throughout this film’s beautifully directed first hour, ominous signs of it are everywhere. Protected inside her garage, Carol sneezes. In aerobics class she jumps impassively and doesn’t sweat. A hair permanent somehow makes her nose bleed. One day, she sits while servants and workmen quietly navigate around her, not even knowing what language to speak in her own home. (“Can I have some milk? Some leche?” she uneasily asks the maid.) There’s no corner of this world in which Carol belongs.
The safest thing about “Safe,” opening today at the Angelika Film Center, is surely a target like Carol, who’s more a specimen than a heroine as she makes her wan, enervated way through Mr. Haynes’s story. Yet for a while he succeeds in making her the most hauntingly cryptic bourgeoise this side of “Belle de Jour,” failing only when it comes time to give his audience some glimpse of her inner life. Brilliantly as it begins, “Safe” eventually succumbs to its own modern malady, as the film maker insists on a chilly ambiguity that breeds more detachment than interest. The misanthropy of Mr. Haynes’s aggressively clever “Poison” is more muted here, but it still has a numbing effect.
Devoting the first half of “Safe” to capturing a dead world under glass, Mr. Haynes displays a hauntingly effective visual style. Long shots, flat compositions and cruel fluorescent lighting create a powerfully disorienting effect, as does the neurasthenic edge Ms. Moore subtly brings to Carol’s role. Her performance remains intelligent and alive even when the character begins dying on the vine.
Frightfully polite at first, Carol begins losing composure in gradual stages, until she begins having panic attacks that shred the decorousness of her San Fernando Valley life. One of the film’s spookiest sequences finds Carol at a baby shower, dutifully saying all the right things until she just can’t take it anymore. Having commented on the cake (“This is delicious”) and the hostess’s child (“She’s getting so big”), Carol suddenly finds herself gasping for breath and falling apart.
“Do you smell fumes? Are you allergic to the 20th century?” Carol sees that sign on a bulletin board and it strikes a nerve. She begins exploring environmental illness, thinking she is being poisoned by stray chemicals that are insinuatingly evident. And she finds herself drawn to a New Age community led by “a chemically sensitive person with AIDS” and given over to rituals as arcane as those of squeaky-clean suburbia. Or are they? Mr. Haynes makes fools of these New Agers while possibly embracing some of their views.
The film’s emblematic figure is seen in the distance at Wrenwood, the retreat near Albuquerque, N.M., where Carol arrives lugging her suitcases and an oxygen tank. Safety at Wrenwood may mean the security of a porcelain-lined igloo or the supposed comfort of consciousness-raising sessions. (“Now, Speaker No. 2, describe to your friend a room that you remember having as a child,” says the instructor at one session.) Meanwhile, across the desert, Carol glimpses a wraithlike person fully covered by protective gear and moving as if in pain. “He’s just very, very afraid,” someone explains. “Afraid to eat. Afraid to breathe.”
How does life at Wrenwood compare with the life Carol has left behind? Is there spiritual or medical hope for her? Is there anything legitimate she can learn? “Safe” deliberately leaves those questions unresolved as it watches Carol fade pitifully into a weak, sickly specter. The shadow of AIDS implicitly hangs over such a decline, but it doesn’t help bring “Safe” to a conclusion worthy of its inspired beginning. Since his film was shown at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, Mr. Haynes has made slight changes in its latter half without really addressing that problem.
The trickiest role is the small one played by James LeGros, the sappily nice guy at Wrenwood who brings the story a whiff of conventional romance. It’s clear what function Chris would serve in the last reel of a more ordinary film. But he is used here more stubbornly, as a reminder that the ordinary is the last thing on Mr. Haynes’ mind.
Safe (1995)
Directed by: Todd Haynes
Starring: Julianne Moore, Xander Berkeley, Dean Norris, Julie Burgess, Ronnie Farer, Jodie Markell, Susan Norman, Martha Velez, Chauncey Leopardi, Wendy Haynes
Screenplay by: Todd Haynes
Production Design by: David J. Bomba, Clare Scarpulla
Cinematography by: Alex Nepomniaschy
Film Editing by: James Lyons
Costume Design by: Nancy Steiner
Set Decoration by: Mary E. Gullickson
Art Direction by: Anthony Stabley
Music by: Ed Tomney
MPAA Rating: R for a sex scene and brief language.
Distributed by: Sony Pictures Classics
Release Date: June 23, 1995
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