Frank, April, Bill, Alice and Padraig

Rating: Null/10 (23 March 2009)

Frank and April Wheeler live in Revolutionary Road, a Connecticut suburb. April is a failed artist, and so lives at home taking care of her children. Frank is a businessman, and works at a dead end city job. Both are disillusioned, finding little substance in the daily grind of life.
From here on the film merely rehashes themes fully covered by Antonioni half a century ago. Frank and April see their dissatisfaction, firstly, as sexual unfulfillment, and secondly, as a product of their environment. In an attempt to find happiness, Frank thus has a meaningless affair with a young woman whilst April has sex with a friend and later a baby with her husband. But no, such fleeting moments of biological bliss cannot quench what is really an existential problem. And so when Frank and April decide to move to France, echoing the countless characters in Antonioni's filmography who run away, we know that the couple are merely pursuing an empty fantasy. Man's greatest flaw is his incessant belief that some external change can bring about an internal state of bliss.
The sickness that Frank and April feel was long diagnosed by Nietzsche, when he noted that western civilisation was fast moving in the direction of the Last Man, a listless creature with no great passion or commitment. Unable to dream, tired of life, he takes no risks, seeking only comfort, tolerance and security.
Today, First World countries find it increasingly difficult even to imagine a public or universal cause for which one would be ready to sacrifice one's life. Indeed, the split between First and Third World runs increasingly along the lines of an opposition between leading a long, satisfying life full of material and cultural wealth, and dedicating one's life to some transcendent cause. This is the antagonism between what Nietzsche called passive and active nihilism. We in the West are the Last Men, immersed in stupid daily pleasures whilst Eastern radicals are ready to risk everything, engaged in nihilistic struggle up to the point of self-destruction. What is gradually disappearing in this opposition between those who are "in", the Last Men who dwell in gated communities, and those who are "out", are the good old middle classes. The "middle class" is a luxury capitalism can no longer afford.
One of the successors of Antonioni's "malaise movies" is Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut", a film which expands on the post-modern malaise found in all those existential films of the past 2 decades (American Beauty, Fight Club, The Ice Storm, Blue Velvet, Safe, Fear and Loating, Being John Malkovich, Revolutionary Road, In the Bedroom, Little Children etc) by tackling the class and power relationships around its disillusioned couple. Though it also centres on a couple, one a failed artist (Alice) and the other a doctor (Bill), Kubrick's film probes beneath the fantasy image, giving his characters a context which these films typical lack.
On the surface, "Eyes" looks at the dark side of sexual liberation: the full commodification of sexuality, the sterility of a universe dominated by the superego order to enjoy, the collapse of religion and tradition, the worship of pleasure and youth and the prospect of a future totalised by scientific rationality and joylessness. In this world, love cannot flourish without sex; simultaneously, however, love is impossible because of sex. Sex, which proliferates as the epitome of late capitalism's dominance, has permanently stained human relationships. Sex is thus, as Derrida states, simultaneously the condition of the possibility and the impossibility of love. It is both nothing and everything.
But more importantly, "Eyes" is concerned with power, ownership and money and the way they connect with the issues of identity, intimacy and sexuality raised by films like "Revolutionary Road". Indeed, Bill's relationship with a mysterious power figure called Ziegler is at as pivotal in Kubrick's film as his relationship with his wife. Ziegler represents patriarchy, the symbolic order, yet he is also something of a Sadean libertine. He is both the Father who says No (guarantor of the symbolic order) and the Father who enjoys (wrecker of the symbolic).
You might thus say that films like "Revolutionary Road", which reduce their problems to domestic disputes, serve only to cut psychology loose from everything else. It's a type of hermetic, anti-social, ahistorical version of psychology, assuming that the whole cosmos is important only in relation to the conscious white male subject, which, incidentally, is exactly the sleepwalking egocentric complacency Bill begins "Eyes Wide Shut" so conspicuously cocooned in.
Few other films of the past decade (another is Lynch's Mulholland Dr) successfully attempt to open out domestic melodrama into the wider context of power, privilege, and patriarchy, and "Revolutionary Road" is no different, never developing beyond the complacent mindset of smugly moralising Hollywood liberalism.
Indeed, while Frank keeps his wife at home and out of a job, Bill wants nothing less than to block out female desire entirely. "Women aren't like that," he says, hence his attraction to prostitutes and masked women. As sex workers they resume the assigned place of women in his libidinal economy: they are passive recipients of male desire, not, as Alice has so terrifyingly revealed herself to be, agents of their own desire. And of course, it is the frightening realisation that he is himself an "object" exploited in another's "desire", that leads to Bill retreating to fantasy; fantasy being the very banal reality that Frank and April live in.
And so it is the flight into the ordinary, the domestic, the apparently well-constituted identity, that represents escape for The Last Man, but more importantly, it is power and capital, that (he believes) facilitates the actualisation of his dreams.
6/10 – Outdated 60's existentialism. Mendes strikes me as the new Anthony Minghella (both theatre directors). Mendes hides behind his cinematographers, and though his images are always clean and precisely composed, one senses no real visual imagination.