The look of others...

Rating: 9/10 (30 April 2009)

It takes a while for a director to make a really good film. By this I mean a film that not only contains visual beauty or technical mastery. These where things that reigned all over "American Beauty", "Road to perdition" and "Jarhead": but the first one was too wise about its limits, it believed it was better than it really was; the second one was too cold, too exquisite and the third one failed to grab the viewer completely (even when Jake Gyllenhal did his best efforts). With "Revolutionary Road", Sam Mendes enters a whole new world; the world of a film that arouses feelings on the viewer: the world of a really good film.
This new world is in a way also a world he knows. The film is set in the suburbs, where the Wheelers, Frank and April (Leo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet) make a living. Also in a way, the context is different than the one Mendes worked with in "American Beauty"; it's the 1950's and things were decidedly different, but the core is the same: a hell that's waiting to make an appearance in a pleasantness that doesn't seem right. The scene before the title appears could very well be "the first day of this couple's life", but the language in Justin Haythe's script (adapting Richard Yates' novel) lacks Alan Ball's philosophical and sometimes pretentious search of meaning.
However, even when I want to, it's not fair to say "Revolutionary Road" is the better version of "American Beauty". This film has something the other one didn't care much about, and that's how we see ourselves in someone else's eyes; or even better, why do we have to see ourselves in someone else's eyes. The Wheelers are a couple without convictions. They do what they do in life because it was the best they could get and they chose not wanting more. A nice, well paid job for Frank, two lovely kids, the role of a kind housewife in the hands of April This is what the neighborhood knows about the Wheelers: Helen Givings (Kathy Bates) thinks they are adorable, so does their friend/neigh bout Chep (David Harbour). Yes, it's all true, but the viewer is allowed to experience a little more.
The tension is developed inside a big house that Roger Deakin's cinematography captures as an unbearable scenario. Mendes works this from every angle possible: outside the house the tension can be sensed, but never comes to life. Without mattering who they are sharing company with, after a first fascinating discussion in the middle of the highway, every argument occurs indoors. There's one scene in which Frank chases April through the woods, shouting mildly, but it doesn't become more than that. In the house, however, passion flies through the walls; among the couple, with the children nearby and with two particular visits of a peculiar human being called John (a very good Michael Shannon).
So? Which one is it? Do we have to care about what the people around us think? Are we making our own living or are we just satisfying someone else's wishes? And whose wishes are those? As I said, this last film by Mendes makes room for emotions. Much has been said about Winslet and DiCaprio's reunion after the success of "Titanic", and the fact is that their work here is brilliant for the opposite reasons that made their chemistry possible in James Cameron's film. There, they couldn't be together, and the passion and the relationship was almost platonic; their encounters lasted nothing. Here, they are already together, and the relationship has lost, with the years, a passion that's still passion. But it doesn't want to bring them together; it's a passion that's tired of trying to keep alive something that's dying. Thank God that DiCaprio one day decided to make only good movies, because when he wins in intensity there's no one who can beat him.
With these two fantastic main actors, technical mastery, beautiful (almost excessively correct) visuals, intriguing score (yes, Thomas Newman) and the mentioned intensity, Mendes may not even know why he's done his best movie. It's not in the screaming, the crying and the suffering of two people that's explicated to the bone. The true greatness lies -and I think the director wanted people to think this of all his movies but never achieved it- in everything else: in the silence, the looks of everyone involved in the tale, the decisions the characters take and we work so hard to figure out why. That's what strikes us deeply: the rest only increases the hit.