Product Details

• Actors: Julianne Moore, Xander Berkeley, Dean Norris, Julie Burgess, Ronnie Farer
• Directors: Todd Haynes
• Writers: Todd Haynes
• Producers: Christine Vachon, Ernest Kerns, James Schamus, John Hart, Lauren Zalaznick
• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, NTSC
• Rated: R (Restricted)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Sony Pictures
• VHS Release Date: June 13, 2000
• Run Time: 119 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (63 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6303900798
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #195,502 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Carol White (Julianne Moore) is a mousy housewife living the affluent life in the San Fernando Valley when, over the span of a few months, she begins to develop debilitating sensitivities to her environment. A permanent at the hair salon makes her nose bleed and her skin go bad, exhaust from a truck causes her to cough violently, she's allergic to the new couch, goes into seizures at the dry cleaner's. No one understands or credits her condition, least of all her husband or family physician. But the symptoms worsen, and Carol eventually discovers others who suffer from similar environmental illnesses. She checks into a desert spa that caters to those in her predicament, and the staff regales her with touchy-feely, infomercial-style affirmations. All of this could have been broad satire, but director Todd Haynes (Velvet Goldmine) opts for a filming style that captures the empty elegance of Carol's passive lifestyle and looks on with clinical dispassion, so that you can hear the oppressive quiet surrounding her. It's positively eerie, so you know you're not watching just a worthy cause picture or movie of the week. Haynes has more ambition than that, even going so far as to insert a slight buzzing sound in the soundtrack to accentuate the unease. Fluorescent lights? Power lines? Who knows? Maybe it's safe to call it the ominous rumblings beneath the surface of Carol's life, from antiseptic affluence to septic isolation in the spa environment. A model of sustained tone, boasting one of the most remarkable performances by Julianne Moore, from a whole career of remarkable performances. --Jim Gay

From The New Yorker

Carol (Julianne Moore), the heroine of Todd Haynes's peculiar, daring new movie, is a wealthy Southern California housewife stricken with a mysterious disease. The best diagnosis anyone can come up with is "environmental illness"-which means, essentially, that she's allergic to the world she lives in. No matter how sterile her surroundings may seem (and they look as scrubbed and shiny as an operating room) they are, for her, teeming with toxins. The movie is an eerily detached study of biological paranoia. At first, Haynes's manner seems fanatically austere: the heroine's deterioration is rendered in clinical, elegantly alienated long shots. But the movie's rhythm is hypnotic, and when, midway, the action shifts to a New Age desert compound that represents Carol's last hope of restoring her health, the filmmaker's distancing techniques begin to pay off in volatile, eccentric satire. Moore, in a nearly unplayable role, is amazingly vivid and touching; this is a heartbreaking portrait of a woman in full, panicked retreat from life. Also with Xander Berkeley and Peter Friedman. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully subtle and poignant, December 7, 2000

By 

Jay Dickson (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Safe [VHS] (VHS Tape)

This is probably director Todd Haynes's least-known film, and probably his masterpiece. Like JEANNE DIEHLMANN..., the Chantal Ackerman which inspired it, SAFE moves at an incredibly slow pace for its first half to take you into the dreamlike world of its protagonist, a beautiful Los Angeles housewife with almost nothing to do. As you become accustomed to her rhythms, her mounting attacks from (what she believes to be) environmental hazards assume the dimensions of major catastrophes. There is a sequence where Julianne Moore goes into one of these attacks at a shower for a friend--while holding a child on her lap--that is one of the most horrifying scenes I've ever seen in a film, even though it culminates in little more than a nosebleed.

Is the heroine simply hysterical? Are there real environmental poisons at work devastating her body? Or is she reacting against a world that seems to have no place for her even while it pretends to value her highly for her beauty and her wealth? The film offers no easy answers, although it moves to a conclusion of the heroine at a dinner party (and then before a mirror) that will absolutely break your heart. Moore's performance may be the single best before a camera in the Nineties--she's really that good.

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars My wife, who is environmentally ill, was technical advisor to this movie., April 30, 2006

By 

Arther Montandon (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Safe (DVD)

My wife whose name is "Carol" the name of the main character (She goes by Lynn and is listed in the credits) got environmentally ill and almost died in the 1980's before anyone even knew what this illness was. She survived by going through a controversial program created by a doctor whose whole famiily was poisoned by a chemical spill. She remained chemically sensitive and started a non profit organization to help people like herself. Todd Haynes came to our house to go over the script to this movie to get imput from her and a Doctor she worked with who treated victims of this medical problem. She even obtained a lot of the furniture an other items used in the movie. We think the movie was well done and accurate but for the ending. We know it is not a documentary but wanted to say to all who see this movie that the people with environmental illness are not crazy and that the healer type of therapy depicted in the movie is not the cure. There are many resources now to help and this is a recognized disability caused by an accute or long term exposure to toxic chemicals which prevades all of our modern lives daily.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Complex, Ambiguous, Unsafe, May 8, 2006

By 

Wanda B. Red (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Safe (DVD)

Julianne Moore is magnificent in this careful and slow-moving film. The focus of almost every scene -- unusual for a female role -- she never monopolizes the screen. She even lets the furniture compete with her for attention. She thus captures the dislocation and marginalization of the wraithlike housewife "Carol" (or, as she corrects herself to her psychiatrist, "homemaker"), whose life seems central to nobody, even to herself. Although Xander Berkeley plays her sometimes frustrated husband with immense sensitivity, the sex scene between the two, very close to the beginning of the film, makes the act horrifyingly mechanical and manages to show how even the greatest intimacy can be deeply alienating. At the same time, the film is restrained; its ironies are offered so complexly that one is unsure of the point of view.

After Carol becomes seriously ill from exposure to an environment that is increasingly toxic to her, she takes refuge in Wrenwood, a holistic healing camp in the desert. The film remains uncommitted as to what part of Carol's illness is genuinely physical and what part is psychological. The philosophy offered at Wrenwood is also ambiguous, though it remains clear that the sympathy of the film is no more with New Age therapy than it was with the alienating sterility of Carol's lifestyle back in the San Fernando Valley. The film maintains this difficult balance right up to the devastating final scene.

This is not a film that was written to please the Chemical Sensitivity Movement. To read it as a political movie is a mistake.