There’s something about Kate Winslet’s back, and not just because it belongs to Kate Winslet. In a pivotal scene towards the end – where the film should have ended but goes on for about five minutes too long – we see her with her back turned to the audience, standing silently in her living room, as she stares out of her perfect suburban home’s perfect picture window. In an early scene in this movie, she struggles to pull a garbage can to the foot of their driveway, and then stands, frozen, as she faces the horizon. And in front of her are other houses, other lawns, other driveways, other garbage cans.
But not, presumably, other women. The back belongs to the very singular April Wheeler, the heroine housewife of Revolutionary Road, Sam Mendes’ new and effectively claustrophobic film about suburban despair. And she, as presented in the movie, is unique in the sense that she can see “the hopeless emptiness of it all.” In those shots of her back – and we see it again, in a sizzling dance scene, her back perhaps too well-toned for a mid-’50s housewife – the audience is invited to look beyond her and see what she is seeing, perhaps, indeed, that same “hopeless emptiness”.
But more to the point is how her back symbolizes a kind of inscrutability, surrounded by clipped grass and flowery curtains, as if she’s stepped out of a Gregory Crewdson photograph; it’s not what she’s seeing, but what she’s thinking, that occupies the audience at that moment. But though she is the more unknowable of the husband-wife duo – her husband Frank, who is anything but, played ably by Leonardo DiCaprio – she has the audience’s sympathies from the beginning.
Revolutionary Road is based on the 1961 novel by Richard Yates – a book, I must quickly add, I have not yet read, and so I am unable to assess the movie’s fidelity to the text – and explores similar periods and territories charted by John Cheever, the late (and very much lamented) John Updike (and a decade later, Rick Moody). It’s odd to watch this and realize that the film’s seemingly shopworn motifs – adultery, an obsession with facades, the lives of quiet desperation, the little soirees where people drink too much, the overall claustrophobia, and, most important, how the domains of men and women are stubbornly circumscribed (though this part was apparently a little more subterranean in the novel) – weren’t trite for Yates at all. It’s all uncomfortable, but nonetheless a pleasure to watch.
The film starts with a fight, and it’s a harbinger of the marital fireworks to come: April, just after her failed amateur theater performance, remembering Frank’s thwarted ambition, wondering, in one of many existential pangs of regret throughout the film, how they had come to fritter away their lives. This sense of unfulfilled longing eats away at April, and so she presents Frank with a chance for freedom, shown here as a tantalizingly tangible fantasy: to sell their seemingly perfect house and move to Paris, where April will work for a salary (for once) and Frank can, finally, discover what he is meant to do.
Both are surrounded by a host of annoying supporting characters, each one shallower than the last (standing out are Kathy Bates as a realtor, and Dylan Baker as a co-worker), and they stand for, presumably, an entire generation of conformists. (The best peripheral character is actually a bit of a gimmick, namely, the former mentally-institutionalized patient who sees and speaks the truth far better than the nominally sane; it’s a great, edgy performance by Michael Shannon, with Best Supporting Actor Nomination stamped all over it (I totally called that one right), but he’s still a narrative device.)
Hence the singularity of April and Frank’s small, quiet act of rebellion, which makes the two feel temporarily superior over their peers. The film is structured so that April is more sympathetic, but it’s really an acting duet; Frank is faced with a dilemma no less pressing, torn between this search for “something true” and the chance of a promotion, however unmeaningful, from his desk job. But Frank – who unsympathetically begins a desultory fling with a secretary for little reason other than to assert control over something, anything – turns out to be a coward, unable to escape his stifling pragmatism and the possibility of self-discovery. Or one could argue that he was simply being a realist.
Mendes’ earlier breakout film, American Beauty, despite its playful surrealism, had always seemed to me as being unnecessarily cruel, with its characters viewed without pity, like fruit flies under a microscope. And Mendes stumbles here too, though that humor may have come from Yates: in an early scene we see Frank on his way to work surrounded by the same gray-suited and trench-coated men, but the sequence goes on too long after we get the punch line about conformity. (In contrast – in another movie about the suburbs – Hal Hartley has a similar sequence in Trust, but he makes the point and moves on quickly.)
Revolutionary Road is far more generous, and not just because of the luminosity of its stars; it gives the characters more of a chance to breathe. (The little torments they inflict upon each other are not quite Albee-esque, with all the stylized excoriations of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which is a good thing.) I was initially not very convinced with this reuniting of Jack and Rose – it smelled too much of stunt-casting to me, Winslet’s marriage to Mendes notwithstanding – but Winslet here has an appealing hauteur that slowly crumbles in her despondency. And DiCaprio’s boyishness works, for once, because he looks convincingly overwhelmed at the gravity of what lies before him, at the responsibility thrust upon him, of the decisions he has made.
Unfortunately, there are numerous moments when the screenplay is too embarrassingly obvious, when the movie’s life lessons are laid out too clearly for the audience as sound bites for the previews. It seems to me that “Feel something true” is no different from “Know what you need. Know what you want. Know what you can do without”, which is Frank’s ridiculous tag line for the office products he sells, and perhaps that’s deliberate.
But I’m probably in the minority here, because I think the platitudes nonetheless work; we get the palpable sense of two people working things out, feeling around the edges, and expressing themselves unfettered for the first time, even if it’s in the stale language of Madison Avenue and pop psychology — better, at least, than the silence of Winslet’s back. It sounds unreal because their words of honesty are still literally unfamiliar in their mouths.
[Another review, at Lilok Pelikula.]
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