Mid-century marriage meltdown

Rating: 8/10 (11 January 2009)

The talented English stage director Sam Mendes has made another movie that focuses, like his earlier 'American Beauty,' on Stateside suburban discontent. This time his source is Richard Yates' acclaimed 1961 novel of the same name, whose action takes place in 1955. The movie reunites Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet (now Mendes' wife) for the first time since 'Titanic,' which turned both of them into big stars. All of which makes this a movie well worth seeing, and DiCaprio and Winslet, seasoned and proved now, give intense, balls-out performances, as do several in the supporting cast, especially the edgy character actor Michael Shannon. It doesn't all quite work as a movie. Despite performances that are a knockout, the movie feels perfect, yet empty. But the novel is a stunner and even delivered in this skeletal, overly theatrical form leaves you with plenty to think about.
'Revolutionary Road' is a passionate indictment of the roles of men and women in mid-century America and the conformism and lack of imagination imposed by the prevailing institutions. Familiar topics perhaps, but Yates' treatment of them is a seminal one. This will show you where Women's Lib came from. A memorable if artificial shot of an army of men marching down into Grand Central to work in Manhattan, all of them in hats, underlines the prevalent sense that middle class white men were as imprisoned as their spouses in their gray flannel suits, their air-conditioned nightmare, their other-directed conformity from which the only escapes were the liquid lunch of tee many martoonies, the quick rolls in the hay with sad little secretaries. The movie is good at capturing the outward shell; not so successful at penetrating within. The Fifties are dangerous ground for younger filmmakers, who have trouble seeing beyond the shiny cars and jaunty jazz.
Another, perhaps more insidious, defense was irony and detachment. Frank Wheeler (Leonardo DiCaprio) seeks refuge there, while dabbling in martinis and secretaries too. He pretends to disdain his copy-writing job with a business machine company. For this same company his father worked for decades, unnoticed by executives, as a New Jersey sales representative. Frank, despite his disdain, which implies he envisions still better for himself, is on the way to a materially better life than his Willy Loman father. At thirty he drives a Buick, has this decent job, and lives with his pretty blond wife and their two young kids in a pretty house in Connecticut with lots of lawn. Their neighbor, Mrs. Helen Givings (Kathy Bates), the real estate agent who sold them the house, thinks them a lovely couple. When April (Winslet) was dating Frank, she thought him the most interesting, different, adventurous man she'd ever met. They think of themselves as detached from their surroundings: intelligent, creative. He has spoken of living in Paris. She fancies herself as an actress.
But nothing works, because April and Frank are only pretending to be better than their surroundings and are both quite ordinary. The couple comes on scene with a major row after April has starred in an amateur play production that is a flop. In the novel, the performance of the play, and April's evident pain as it disintegrates around her, are described in excruciating detail, but the movie skips all that and cuts to the drive home. What is surprising is how mean and accusatory Frank is. He originally thought of nice and comforting things to say to April about the play, but that's all in the book, not the movie.
April cooks up the plan of moving to Paris. They will sell the house and the car. She has heard secretaries for international organizations get high salaries in Paris. She'll work to support them (presumably with a nanny for the kids) while Frank discovers himself. Frank very reluctantly gives in, and they go ahead with plans to move. April reassures the children they'll survive with fewer toys and new friends. The Givings bring their son John (Shannon), who's been in a mental institution, and while the Paris idea shocks his parents, he congratulates Frank and April on their decision to escape from the boredom of middle-class America. Then something happens, and it all falls apart. For one thing, a memo Frank writes as a lark gets him recognition from the top management and the offer of a promotion that's too exciting to resist. The verbal fights between April and Frank, fueled by endless drinks and cigarettes, get more and more bitter, until finally there is silence, in a chilling nice breakfast when April sees Frank off to work before tragedy strikes.
Frank is not an attractive person. He has neither talent nor character, and takes unconvincing refuge in being a smart-ass. He's a rotter, condescending toward his wife, a liar, a man too full of himself to possess self-awareness. DiCaprio embraces and embodies all that. The role of April is harder because she's repressed, hiding. Her earlier enthusiasm for Frank as the most interesting person she's met becomes pathetic when it's revealed to have been so mistaken. Ultimately the movie has trouble working as a movie because both its main characters are hollow shells. It would take a lot of prose (which is found in Yates' novel) to fill in substance around these shells.
The screenplay captures the main movements of the novel. But the exquisite cinematic detail, the precisely correct-to-period drapes, rugs, couches, suits, hats, and so forth, down to the overly-interesting artworks on the Wheeler walls, distract from the intense interactions. Must quite so many cigarettes be lit, cocktail glasses of gin quaffed? The movie's devastating scenes from a marriage would work better as a play with simple sets, without sprinklers and lawns and Buicks and Grand Central. Sam Mendes, as a stage director, may have miscalculated in seeing the screenplay as a series of intense scenes of dialogue and not perceiving how the movie-work surrounding these scenes of dialogue would undermine them.