To paraphrase one of dear Peggy Noonan's many banalities, it's Autumn in America. Maple trees are sporting leaves so shrilly colored they vie for attention with a strenuousness not seen since Sharon Stone last attended the Cannes Film Festival. It's 2006 and Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore) is a very lucky woman reaping the sumptuous benefits of being a dutiful Christian wife in an affluent Republican neighborhood. It's a perfect world where most people know their place and, with an arsenal of frosty glares and telephones, are vigilant in keeping those less percipient in theirs. The language is kept clean by colorful parents; the homes are kept clean by colored help. .

Period pieces are always tricky. Whether it is the Lord giving everyone the humiliation of psoriasis in Revelation, men wearing more eye make-up than Jan Crouch in A Clockwork Orange or Tom Cruise in Minority Report bearing down on you with a smile so contrived and artificial it cries to be relocated onto the Exquisite Corpse mug of Michael Jackson, most projections of the future are filled with frightening images. Indeed, anyone foolish enough to become sanguine about the benign charms of the imminent, simply need contemplate two more years of relentless nonsense from media-junkie Jennifer Lopez (a woman who could wring ink out of a bagel) to know that the future is terrifyingly bleak.

Therefore, it is refreshing to see the unabashedly optimistic depiction of America's future in Far From Heaven. There are no scenes with demon-possessed calendar pages flying off walls, so we are left to guess the year we are joyously viewing. Judging from the apparent banishment of sluttish midriff tops and politically correct speech, however, it is clear that a Republican has been in the White House for at least six years, so I am guessing 2006.

Homeland Security has taken root and is working successfully to detect and brand dissidents (i.e., liberals). Indeed, John Ashcroft's suburban army of watchful housewives has been deployed to maintain vigilant surveillance of potential enemies craftily passing themselves of as "childhood friends." Informers, armed with a tart daiquiri or a disarming "I'm your best friend and you can tell me anything," prowl parties and parking lots waiting for the malodorous indicia of liberalism to waft up from awkward situations.

Everyone rests comfortably at night, knowing that Mr. Bush is using enormous computers to track all mail, credit card purchases, medications and magazine subscriptions with an accuracy that eludes even the most vigilant Christian neighbor. But all Real Americans know that the last defense to liberalism's most pernicious and powerful weapon (so-called "privacy") starts at the curb. It is only through diligent gossip about people who flaunt their differences that we can bring every sensible-heeled toe to the line of conservative values.

And I am pleased to report that Biblical values are everywhere in Far From Heaven. A seemingly innocent young girl is righteously stoned for the sins of her father ("I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me." Exodus 20:5) It truly is a Republican Nirvana! Everywhere you look, hard cocktails (which we ladies at Landover Baptist refer to with delicacy as a "thingtails") in quality stemware; nothing served in a bong or crack pipe. Children are scraped off the pavement, not the uterus. And no one is "gay;" they are "arrested."

Yes, it is a perfect world. But Cathy Whitaker turns out to be an America Hater who undermines conservative values and must pay the price for her vile unorthodoxy. Her downfall, of course, is the poison of liberalism. While it is not hard to love a lady who wears mink to a police station, Real Americans have no time for a Caucasian woman who wears a "come hither" look when addressing her dark-skinned servants.

Even the local Homeland Security journalist Mona Lauder unflinchingly observes that Cathy is "nice to Negroes." Her best friend Eleanor (Patricia Clarkson) patriotically informs on her by revealing that Cathy "has been a liberal ever since she played in summer stock with those Jewish boys." This is our cue that not only is Cathy alarmingly tolerant, she also socializes with unsaved boys who own their own tap shoes!

Perhaps it was this careless fraternizing with Sondheim-loving Nancy boys that made it so easy for Cathy to ruin her Christian marriage by driving her husband Frank (Dennis Quaid) into the arms (and other things) of sodomites. By making her handsome hubby feel guilty for a routine drunken slap across the face, Cathy not only ignores the Lord's insistence that wives be submissive ("Wives, submit to your own husbands" Ephesians 5:22), she also makes Frank question his masculinity. Her radical feminism leaves him no option other than to run off to a motel room to renlentlessly research the hobby of being a homosexual. Frank tells Cathy that he is "going to lick this problem." Regrettably, Cathy does not realize just how literally he means this.