Watch Fellini Instead

Rating: 7/10 (28 January 2009)

With a first rate cast, cinematographer, score composer and his own fine direction, Mendes' latest project is tantalizing because it does such a good job rendering the blind intensity that accompanies so many failed couples as they discover and try to grapple with their failure. However, the implicit explanation for the failure of this couple (and the corresponding kind of moral failure portrayed for each of the individual lives in this marriage) has no plausibility, and thus the film's accuracy in portraying the mutual misunderstanding and emotional confusion of Frank and April Wheeler as they face up to the realities of their lives is largely wasted. It is not that one cannot imagine people who, feeling trapped in comfortable but uninteresting lives, get desperate about their situation. While the self-congratulatory ring of artists depicting such bad lives (artists we know wouldn't be caught dead living like thisartists like Terry Zwigoff come to mind) is a bit much, it is the utter implausibility of *these* two people, neither of whom has more than a *vague desire to be special*, getting this histrionically desperate at the prospect of living a life no more special than that of anyone else that ground my suspension of disbelief into dust. April, the most desperate of the two, has made a run at acting early in their marriage and proved no good at it. But she still wants to believe there's something special over the rainbow, and so badly, we are supposed to believe, that she is willing to uproot her own life and those of her entire family to take her husband to Paris, where his own utterly vague, intermittent, and apparently alcohol-related desire to live in a 'way that seems to matter' can be tested at long last. Neither of them can articulate what it is they hope to gain or even *experience* if this longed-for world comes to pass. And in that respect, these are just like the vague dreams of a 12 year old. Whatever else, they are not the natural result of a deadening but comfortable life in late 1950s east coast suburbia for people who have a little more 'lift' in their boots than their fellow man and woman. I have not read the corresponding novel, and hope it doesn't try to make the case for this absurd proposition, but clearly Mendes is prepared not only to believe this kind of nonsense, but to make very expensive art promoting it. It's a nice Oscar vehicle for his wife, and there are some good scenes, particularly those with Kathy Bates and her electro-shocked son (who in this piece plays a cross between soothsayer and Greek chorus). For a far better movie that deals with the same subjects, try Fellini's "Juliet of the Spirits". I'm not sure Juliet is real, either, but in that movie you *believe* she is (and care what happens to her).