unhappy together and utterly absorbing...

Rating: Null/10 (31 March 2009)

A decade ago Kate and Leo helped salvage the bloated monstrosity TITANIC with a magical chemistry that made their love story touching and important. The chemistry sparks anew in their first screen reunion though for the characters they play here the magic has been draining from their lives. Frank and April Wheeler are a middle-class couple living in Fifties Connecticut with their two children. April's the home-maker while Frank is a sales executive with a machine-manufacturing company in New York where his late father used to work. Their early dreams of being something special have failed to materialise. April, increasingly chafing against domesticity, seeks an outlet in amateur dramatics but everything goes wrong on the night and her confidence is shattered. Frank's attempt at reassurance on the way home she construes as condescension and they have a blazing row.. Frank's approach to his job is a mix of detachment and disdain but leaves him too far into his own comfort-zone to want to break out of it and he takes the opportunity to begin an affair with a receptionist. It's his birthday, as it happens, and he gets home late to find that April and the kids have prepared a party for him which pricks his conscience and brings him to tears.
April's last-ditch idea to revitalise their relationship is for them to uproot permanently to Europe where she would get a job as a secretary in a U.S. Government agency leaving Frank time to "find himself". As his own view of what this might entail seems pretty vague he endorses the notion half-heartedly to keep the peace but when she finds she's pregnant again and he's offered a promotion at work the pipe-dream goes the way of all the others. Back in her trap April makes her own opportunity for extra-marital sex with the guy across the way who secretly fancies her. But it's the unwelcome intrusion of another neighbour into their fragile hearth and home which exacerbates a night of crisis for the pair with April staying out in the woods alone. On what proves to be their final morning together she acts out deliberately and calmly the perfect scenario of the dutiful and solicitous wife before Frank leaves for work and she goes on to trigger, with resolution, an appalling tragedy... Richard Yates' densely-analytical novel, first published nearly fifty years ago, gets a bit oppressive and over-written at times in its relentless dissection of motives and self-deceptions to the extent that its characters begin to feel like specimens under a microscope. And I was less than impressed, in both book and film, with the crude device of the lunatic neighbour. John Givings is an institutionalised man who's had shock-treatment and is released part-time to his family. His mother insists on bringing him along on visits to the Wheelers where his increasingly sardonic and tactless observations - like parting a spider-web with a meat-cleaver - cause Frank to finally rear up and give him a roasting. The mother tearfully protests "He's not well, Frank !" which for me tips the thing for a giddy moment into farce because it kept reminding me irrepressibly of dear old Spike Milligan. (He'd wanted "I told you I was ill" written on his gravestone but they'd only allow it in Irish). Spike was off the wall too but he was also a comic genius. This fellow's just obnoxious though some in the audience found him amusing.
This blip apart, Sam Mendes' magnetic film offers us air and space - I loved the image of the commuters in their trilby hats pouring into the streets - while honouring the text with precision and a remarkable subtlety perfectly reflected by the two leads - the ever-present conflict between what they say and what they feel, what they think they want and what they're prepared to settle for - or finally not, in April's case, bringing a climax of almost unbearable poignancy.