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Let’s go ahead and be hyperbolic, melodramatic, over the top and emotional: Far From Heaven is a miracle. It’s an unlikely proof of the great maker of fables, the Argentine master Jorge Luis Borges, whose unflappably wry short story, Pierre Menard, the Author of Quixote, in which the driven protagonist attempts, against impossible odds, to compose Cervantes’ "Don Quixote" word-for-word in the modern age. Gus van Sant, vamping, said that was the rationale for his Psycho remake.

How does this apply to the tear-stained new picture from the audacious director of the refined, severe Safe and the gaudy, bombastic Velvet Goldmine? It’s suburban 1950s America, as reflected in studio high style, as recreated by cinematographer Ed Lachman, production designer Mark Friedberg, and the blinding brightness of Sandy Powell’s costumes. Yet it’s all done with contemporary film stocks, lenses, actors. The result is a near-perfect post-modern specimen that lives, breathes, soars. It’s as if an authentic new Kabuki play were performed, a Greek myth invented, not discovered. Far From Heaven is an anachronism of the highest order, assembling a defunct set of signifiers into an emotional marvel, a delirious, grandiloquent, sweeping success.

Yeah. It’s about the power of the unrequited, what we hold inside when we want to shout it to the world. Julianne Moore is a straitlaced housewife whose husband (Dennis Quaid, brave, brilliant, and glorious in every moment of his multiple drunk scenes) has certain secrets; those misprisions, loosed, allow Moore to realize that the most complete man in her sphere is her black gardener (Dennis Haysbert, civility and kindness itself). Complications, as in Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows or Written on the Wind, are sudden and public. It’s often assumed that to be ironic means to be false, but Sirk’s films, particularly this pair you can visit on Criterion DVD, are deeply emotional, steeped in the director’s European theater training, from his knowledge of Greek tragedy to his mounting of early productions of Brecht.

They’re hyper movies, and I love hyper things. "And this is a hyper things kind of movie," Haynes tells me a few weeks after Toronto journalists couldn’t stop blabbing about awards instead of the movie’s substantial accomplishment. "That’s biz--," he starts. "That’s a whole new universe for Todd! It’s easier to just focus on how much more deserving Julianne is and how deserving [composer] Elmer Bernstein is. That, that I can!"

It all leaves him stammering, this dose of E! But c’mon, the guy studied semiotics at Brown. Can’t he talk about Brecht’s distancing effect via Sirk as well as late master Rainer Werner Fassbinder?  "Ultimately, it’s not my intention to distance," he says, working through a nasty cold and a tight little hand-rolled cigarette. "Sometimes, the more you distance, the closer you get to true emotions." For more with Haynes about the intellectual underpinnings of the style of Far From Heaven, click here.

DVD: Jim Jarmusch’s 1986 Down By Law is out in a beautiful black-and-white edition from Criterion; extras on the two-disc set include a video interview with cinematography great Robby Muller, outtakes, and a raft of location stills and production Polaroids. I haven’t had a chance to sample the Jarmusch Q&A or a selection of Jarmusch's phone calls with Waits, Benigni, and Lurie, but I’m sure they’re typical of his intelligent, shaggy-dog wit.

Eme.