They'll Never Have Paris

Rating: 8/10 (3 January 2009)

In one of the classiest pieces of stunt casting in recent years, Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes reunites his wife, Kate Winslet, with her "Titanic" shipmate Leonardo DiCaprio to play the Wheelers in his screen adaptation of Richard Yates' novel "Revolutionary Road." It adds an appealing accessibility to an otherwise depressing tale.
The film opens boldly enough, spending just a few fleeting moments showing us how the Wheelers met before throwing us head first into their disaster of a marriage. April (Winslet) always had dreams of being an actress and Frank (DiCaprio), well, Frank always had some vague idea of living in Paris. The film chronicles their sad story. The Wheelers are meant to represent the post WWII generation who during the prosperous 1950's created suffocating lives due to dreams deferred in exchange for chasing the so-called "American Dream" that they never really believed in. Everyone else in the film is in some sort of love with the Wheelers and their picture perfect lives, but the Wheelers hate themselves, each other, their neighbors, and what they have become. It's a damning little portrait that has been painted before in literature and film, but never quite so acutely.
I haven't read Richard Yates' novel, but I am currently reading his collection of short stories which address many of the same themes and bear his hallmarks present here: cutting dialog, keen insights into the psyche of his sometimes despicable or just plain sad characters, and obsessive attention to details of time and place. In terms of the tone of Yates' writing, Mendes is successful in his translation. However, that tone that worked so well on the page doesn't always work on screen. We're never sure if we're meant to sympathize with the Wheelers or if Mendes wants us to view it as a dark comedy where we watch in sick delight as the popular kids who always thought they were more interesting than everyone else grow up to be horribly dysfunctional and cripplingly normal. Much of the audience I saw the film with laughed to break the tension during some of Mendes' trademarked "uncomfortable dinner table scenes", but we all watched in horror as the film spun out of control into its downer of a climax.
Ultimately one sits through a film like this for the acting, and it doesn't disappoint on that level. Taking a line from the film, DiCaprio is a "cracker jack" playing for the first time a husband, a father, and a hopelessly average Joe. Winslet is on more familiar ground, but never has she been given so much range to roam, and her director husband lets her run wild and free. It's a neurotic, brave, and sometimes questionable performance that is a rare sight to behold. At times it seems as if Mendes is directing a stage-play rather than a film, and he lets the whole cast scream and holler against his finely detailed period backdrops, but it's still entertaining for those who enjoy watching polished professionals (including Michael Shannon portraying a man on leave from an insane asylum in a perfect pitch) stretch their acting muscles.
One watches the grim dissolution of this marriage wondering if there isn't some subtext to explore with regards to Winslet and Mendes' own seemingly perfect Hollywood marriage. And as unlikable as they are at times, and no matter how much we would rather laugh at then relate to another human being, one can't escape the sickening feeling that there might be a little bit of Frank and April Wheeler in all of us.