Examining the 50s, while bathing in the 60s
Written: Jun 17 '09 (Updated Jun 17 '09)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Wardrobe. Lighting.
Cons: The drama is constantly seen through the prism of a modern eye, which wrecks it.
The Bottom Line: A trip to the museum with an art snob instead of an art lover.
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| swmckewon's Full Review: Revolutionary Road |
There is a play staged in the first act of “Revolutionary Road,” but the viewer never glimpses a scene of it. Rather, we see a curtain closing on the alarmed face of Kate Winslet, her eyes doubtful and filling with tears, and it is to the credit of director Sam Mendes, and Winslet herself, that we know this woman was the nominal star of this play, and she was not good in it.
If only the rest of the film were so subtly expressive.
But the source Richard Yates novel, a withering critique on the American Dream in the 1950s, is not a quiet work. Mendes, Winslet and actor Leonardo DiCaprio are not quiet artists. The result is a film of too many lines delivered just so, too much dramatic, almost noirish lighting, too much postmodernism for a film set in an era when the concept of postmodern was just being born.
The result, for me, was a more urbane, albeit less juicy, version of the ludicrous melodrama that is the “Mad Men” television series, whose connection to reality is (purposely?) tenuous at best. “Revolutionary Road,” meanwhile, is a trip to the museum with an art snob instead of an art lover. You feel diminished and withdrawn next to the former. You begin to love art in the company of the latter. Whatever emotional truth Yates might have pricked at in his written work – and it’s arguably not as much as critics in his era would like to claim – is lost in the “movieness” of the film adaptation.
Maybe Mendes’ style simply can’t reach it, while his wife, Winslet, seems too ready to compensate for his artistic weaknesses by tapping, almost on cue, the reservoir of pain that resides inside her Alice Wheeler, who lives with husband, Frank (DiCaprio), in suburban Connecticut.
A lovely home with shutters. Two nice enough kids. The knowledge that their intellectually inferior neighbors adore them somewhat inappropriately. These small, empty comforts aren’t enough for the Wheelers, especially after Alice bombs in her acting debut. A dramatic (read: false-seeming) roadside argument after the play reveals the fissures in their marriage – Frank’s turned his own discontent with a shabby advertising job onto Alice with veiled critiques and miniature exercises of his male dominance, while Alice is a bit of a pouty brat – and sets in motion Alice’s day of self-discovery (while she folds clothes, makes dinner), within which she hatches a plan to move to Paris, get a job as a NATO secretary, and give Frank the time he needs to locate his passion.
Just hours after cheating on Alice with a squeaky-voiced, bug-faced secretary (Zoe Kazan) Frank arrives home, eats his birthday dinner, hears Alice’s plan, and agrees to it. This acceptance, which the audience must buy in order to be properly stung by Frank’s later reversal, is little more than a function of the plot. DiCaprio doesn’t sell it, nor does he even try. Frank’s character is a cipher in the eyes of Mendes, a prominent face in the crowd, and DiCaprio won’t bother arguing it with his portrayal. The best actors carve out a little space not in the script. Leo’s content to let his best buddy Winslet steal the show.
Except April doesn’t. Winslet does, to some extent, because she looks and acts like Kate Winslet, and that goes a long way in just about any film. But April, as a character, is more a frightened liar than, say, the cross between Hedda Gabler and the heroine from “The Awakening,” that Yates arguably wrote her to be. There’s no sense that relocating to Paris will do April any emotional good, much less Frank. And there’s no substance to the yearning, just a girlish preening after she buys the tickets in her smashing yellow dress. Later, when Winslet delivers her “Oscar” speech in a dimly-lit dive, she underplays it, as if dissecting the character for an acting class.
And when April’s unplanned third pregnancy suddenly derails the potential move, Justin Haythe’s script doesn’t provide the kind of depth needed to explore April’s desperation for an abortion, which, at the time, was a far more serious and dangerous situation for the unwed mother, and akin to speaking Voldemort’s name out loud for the married woman. Mendes handles April and Frank’s argument over the matter, and April’s subsequent decision with a postmodern hand that knows more than Yates or his characters did at the time.
Hovering over the film is the peculiar John Givings, the mentally unstable son of a local real estate agent (Kathy Bates, wasted) who drops into the movie for two grandstanding scenes of, uh, great truth-telling, Portrayed by actor Michael Shannon with maximum doddering, jittering and Bela Lugosi affectation, John is nuts and seemingly loving it, Shannon delivering so much black comedy that the performance, while, um, intriguing, is like a shiv in the movie’s side. His final bleat, shown in an impressive two-shot with a stunned Winslet sitting at her kitchen table while John leans into an open doorway, is hilarious, really, a fresh, bold piece of KOOKY, as if Mendes called in a pinch actor to spice up the movie, and Shannon, on cue, shifts into emotional Tourette’s.
What the hell happened to this movie? DVD extras reveal some scenes left on the cutting room floor, but they didn’t help much. Rather, I’d argue Mendes, Winslet and, yes, DiCaprio reviewed the project, turned their dials to the “doomed” setting, and proceeded accordingly. The film makes no secret of “rooting” for April; the book doesn’t either, but Yates at least fleshes it out enough to appreciate that April, too, is lacking some key, transformative element. In “Revolutionary Road,” we can’t help but sense that the filmmakers think April Wheeler is secretly extraordinary. The movie’s climax is hideous, not only for making a dreadful subject a moment of pointless, cutesy, contemplative art, but for suggesting that such a desperate, sad, and ultimately dishonest act is a kind of beauty signified with a single, menacing red splotch on a dress. Mendes has made a career out of crafting such images; in “Revolutionary Road,” they just seem precious and judgmental.
And some discredit needs to go the Yates novel, which, after a second read, seems overheated and arrogant in its own right. Yates may lay out his case in more detail, but the case, as we look back, is a little dubious, especially considering how many ticked-off malcontents emerged from that era of great self-discovery, the 1960s.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
swmckewon
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Reviews written: 22
Trusted by: 2 members
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