So-so

Rating: 6/10 (1 September 2010)

Like the book, the film starts off abruptly, and tosses us into the maelstrom of the Eisenhower era marriage of Frank and April Wheeler (Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet), dilettantes without any chance to connect with nor care for these characters. Both end up having affairs, both dream stupidly of running away from adulthood to live in France, but Frank is a bit more grounded, and after he is offered a promotion, and she gets pregnant with a third child, they decide to stay put. He comes to realize that there is nothing special about him, save perhaps for some sales talent, but April- a failed actress- clings to the delusion that she is special, but she's a Joey. The only person with any insight into the couple (shallow and predictably Hollywood as it is) is John Givings (Michael Shannon), the nut job son of the real estate agent, Helen Givings (Kathy Bates), who sold the Wheelers their home. She, in turn, is a petty busybody with a long suffering husband. Howard (Richard Easton). The other major characters are Shep and Millie Campbell (David Harbour and Kathryn Hahn), the Wheelers' neighbors, and the young co-worker (Zoe Kazan) Frank seduces. In the end, April suicides by giving herself an abortion, and Frank moves away. There are minor differences from the book, but the film ends with the same moment, Howard Givings turning down his hearing aid as his wife gossips on about the Wheelers and the new couple she sold their home to.
In fact, in both the novel and the film, the defining quality one sees is cowardice. Both of the Wheelers are cowards, in that neither seems to fully want to recognize that they are ordinary people, with ordinary lives and ordinary responsibilities, although it is April who is the biggest fool. Her only oppression comes not from the suburbs (oh, how bad it is to live in peace and security!) but from her own overweening sense of self-importance, even though she has never accomplished a thing of note. Her idiocy (and I'm not even counting her drinking, smoking, and extramarital sex while pregnant) even goes so far as to cajoling Frank, in soap operatic nonsensical fashion, into abandoning their lives for Paris by cooing that this will let him be a man; as if Hemingwayvianism is the only way a man can be a man: working at a job to support her and the kids is not enough proof, apparently.
Overall, Revolutionary Road, the film, is at about the same artistic level as its progenitor novel, with a few more pluses and minuses. That its flaws were not corrected falls on the shoulders of Mendes, who has a tendency to make didactic films that proffer vacuous platitudes, while its pluses seem to be immanent in the fact that a lost era's sensibilities and styles can be more easily and quickly conveyed via visual art rather than the written word. As an adaptation, the best way to have brought out the book's strengths would have been to eliminate all the clichéd melodramatic moments and focused, instead, on a single event in their shared lives, then explored the characters more deeply. That adaptations do not do this more often is puzzling, since, as an adaptation, there is that very license to adapt the damned thing! That means reducing flaws and maximizing good qualities. Instead, however, Mendes is content to let his characters, incapable of rational thoughts beyond clichés, prattle on and on and on. But, fear not: take a cue from Howard Givings and.