Preferred Little Children

Rating: Null/10 (13 January 2009)

The anxiety and disappointment of fading dreams linger throughout Sam Mendes' suburban nightmare, Revolutionary Road. The fear of expiration dates on the Wheelers' dreams cast gloom on their lives, especially Kate Winslet's April. Sam Mendes has traveled down this road with his Oscar winning film, American Beauty. In some ways, one could argue that Revolutionary Road is a prequel to American Beauty. Sam Mendes covers similar themes in both films-- broken marriages, the suicidal blandness of the suburbs, lack of career fulfillment and the paralysis of conformity. Revolutionary Road wants desperately to feel like a great film, and at times it is very powerful, but by the end the audience is exhausted. The film is an unrelenting assault on the Fifties; one might think that Sam Mendes has declared war on the decade. He and the screenwriter, Justin Haythe, have done a pedestrian job of adapting Richard Yates' 1961 novel. The film joins a number of truly great films that have covered the bleak and dark world of suburbia such as Franks Perry's 1970 film, Diary Of A Mad Housewife, Alan Parker's 1982 film, Shoot The Moon, Ang Lee's 1997, The Ice Storm, and especially Todd Field's 2006 masterpiece, Little Children.
I would have given the best Actress Oscar to Kate Winslet for the Madame Bovary Book Club scene in Field's, Little Children. As Sarah Pierce, she was perfect and her character is so far gone and delusional that she thinks she is Madame Bovary. It is a commanding performance; perhaps, a lifetime milestone. Roles do not come along like that very often, but Winslet took it and created one of the most intense characters of the year. Any film which follows Little Children is going to suffer by comparison. April Wheeler is not that very different from Bovary or Sarah Pierce. They are all women who wanted more from life. Yet, this is not the only character that Kate Winslet has played this year that seems to be in a prison of her own making. Hanna Schmitz in The Reader is another character that is trapped by the choices she has made. To be very honest with you, I have very little empathy for either one regardless of the terrific performances by Kate Winslet.
What is very interesting about the analogy to Todd Field's, Little Children is that Todd Field had originally planned to follow up In The Bedroom with Revolutionary Road. Instead he chose to adapt Tom Perrotta's novel, Little Children. Both films and the novels they are based on compliment each other greatly. I can see what attracted Field the Revolutionary Road in the first place. Tom Perrotta addresses similar suburban unrest in Little Children. Tom Perrotta and Richard Yates explored the emotional turmoil and desperate yearnings for something more substantial in the lives of bored suburbanites. What makes Revolutionary Road so interesting is that Yates wrote his book in 1961 and it took place in the 1950's. Even at the dawn of suburbia, Yates was willing to take a stab at the emptiness of sprawl. I am grateful that Todd Field chose to adapt Little Children instead of Revolutionary Road. I like having Little Children as the meat between the two Sam Mendes films about suburbia. Todd Field's film impressed us as did American Beauty. Revolutionary Road comes with so much advance hype that it cannot possibly live up to its advanced publicity. I am beginning to think that Little Children, like There Will Be Blood, is one of the great American films of the decade. For me, Little Children haunts Revolutionary Road in the same way that Anatole Litvak's Night Of The Generals haunts Bryan Singer's Valkyrie and in the same way that Whit Stillman's Barcelona haunts Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Here is the thing-- Todd Field did it better with Little Children than Sam Mendes did it with American Beauty. Given what Todd Field was able to do with Tom Perrotta's novel, I can only imagine what he could have done with Richard Yates novel. It is not that I think Sam Mendes is a bad director. He hit gold with American Beauty. I think The Road To Perdition is better than people give it credit for. Jarhead read better as a memoir than as a film, but the film has several great performances. Going back to the suburbs should have been a triumph for Sam Mendes, especially since he is finally directing his wife. I still think Todd Field, David Gordon Green or Paul Thomas Anderson could have made a truly epic film of Yates's novel.
And as nice as it might be to see the Titanic lovers together again; I kept wondering how much better it would have been to see a young Tom Courtenay and a young Julie Christie playing Frank and April Wheeler. Or could you imagine Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor playing these roles. The insanity and intensity of the performances would have been overwhelming.
Michael Shannon steals Revolutionary Road from Winslet and DiCaprio. He sees through April and John immediately. At first he goes along with the couple's battle against suburbia's emptiness, but then he sees through their corrosive self-deception. John is no different from Jackie Earle Haley's Ronnie J. McGorvey in Little Children. It is always the outsider, the misfit, or the criminal that is the most sane and rational person in these films.
I am not sure how sympathetic one can be to the plight of the Wheelers I am all for following your bliss in this life, but something does not ring true in the film for the time it was made. The idea of escaping to Paris may feel dated by today's standards, but that is not the film's weakest flaw. Frank Wheeler has a successful job. And right now that is a luxury many Americans do not have.