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Anyone can do a goddamn satire, Haynes got the style JUST RIGHT. That was extremely difficult to do considering the evolution in style since the 50s. It was amazing that it did NOT seem ineffectual. What's particularly genius about this is that Haynes, counter to what I expected, made a movie that did NOT condemn the 1950s. He validated the era's forms of expression (with the movie as a whole and the scene with the "modern" art) while taking a reverse moral stance. Effectively, he separated a culture's form from a culture's content, which is very much contrary to the post-modern attitudes you usually see in movies this highly meta-cinematic. If you can take a step back and look at the significance of the melodrama style has for the content of the movie, you'd appreciate it a lot more.
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