Review: Revolutionary Road (2/5)

Revolutionary Road
(Sam Mendes)
Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Kathy Bates, Michael Shannon, Kathryn Hahn.
Running time: 119 minutes. (16)

The last time we saw Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet together on screen was in Titanic, where their love was so large, it tore a permanent hole in the box office. Now, they reunite in Revolutionary Road, and they’re stuck in a marriage that gives you that sinking feeling. It’s 1955, suburban Connecticut, and the Wheelers are disillusioned with their slice of American pie. Although Frank Wheeler thinks April is overreacting: “You really are being melodramatic about this whole thing,” he says. But she is justified: this is, after all, a modern spin on the 1950s melodrama.
Those movies, perfected in duplicitous gloss by Douglas Sirk, roamed a gilt-edged surface of postwar privilege and poked gently until all sorts of unspoken trouble spilled out. But in Revolutionary Road, adapted from Richard Yates’ lauded 1961 novel, the director Sam Mendes wants brass tacks. It might be 1955, but Frank and April are going to behave like they’re in a modern movie. Heck, the story even gives them self-awareness. “I don’t fit the role of dumb, insensitive, suburban husband,” says Frank, insensitively, before he dents his fist on the car. We’ve just met them, and the film already is pitched with bitterness and resentment. They’re blaming each other for their failed dreams. Like the snarking Kevin Spacey in Mendes’ American Beauty, they know how bad things are.
April, wrapped in apron and domestic drudge, yearns with vague angst for something different. She urges Frank to quit his city ad job so they can go with the kids and live in Paris. To do what, Frank asks. (Why, another advertising job, you think. Does he not realise he’s in a retro ’50s movie?). The film is keen to remind us what he could escape: cinematographer Roger Deakins crafts an immaculate tableaux of shots that bury Frank in a sea of grey suits and hats. But it would make you sigh. For Revolutionary Road is yet another public vivisection of the middle classes.
But there’s spice. When the Wheelers fight, it’s with venomous authenticity. The picture brims then spills with foaming nastiness. In Far From Heaven, Todd Haynes’ glorious 2001 take on the Sirkian melodrama, the characters spoke with unfinished sentences; rooms filled up with things that could not be said. Haynes, instead, conveyed feelings through a blaze of expressionistic colour. But Mendes, whose canvas is shot with crystalline mediocrity, has his characters say everything that needs to be expressed, until they’re cut adrift, vessels in an empty marriage.
You watch Frank pause in his driveway to reflect on their perfect suburban home, and you know he’s thinking it’s all a sham. But you don’t feel sorry for them. April may whiff of Bovary, but if she were a book she would be Madam Bovine. There’s a flashback, with Kathy Bates’ estate agent Helen Givings (typical busybody neighbour), where April first sees the house. “Oh yes,” she says.
Perhaps her flaw is an inability to smell bullshit. When she first meets Frank, she finds him mysterious when really he’s a vague bore. He’s the kind of smooth cat who martinis a secretary into bed after lunch or fires off a half-assed report in work only for the boss to haul him in and offer him a promotion. Add that lure to an unexpected pregnancy, and Paris, that half-imagined dream, turns into a screaming delusion.
You can see the film straining to rock their boat and DiCaprio and Winslet give it their all, which isn’t a lot for DiCaprio, but plenty for Winslet. (Imagine stage directions from her husband Mendes: ‘Think five failed Oscar noms, darling’. For April’s emotional arc is just like Oscar night: deliriousness, disillusion, a second wind, followed by crashing disappointment, numbness etc.)
The real electricity comes from Michael Shannon’s neighbour John, a PhD maths whizz with mental health issues, and the sanest man on the block. Shannon oozed mystery and danger in last year’s potent Shotgun Stories and here he brings something of Joe Pesci: though you fear not what he is going to do but what he is going to say, as it usually upsets. “People are on to the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness,” he tells us, clearly speaking for the director. For Mendes thinks he’s on to something subversive: he wants to skewer the hopelessness of Frank and April’s puny lives and shatter too the conventions of the Hays Code melodrama: instead of characters stumbling through emotional calamity towards self-knowledge, he wants to cage them in with abortion and infidelity until they claw themselves to death.
I preferred the more profound, gentle love of Haynes’ Far From Heaven, and I suspect that Mendes has no real love for the genre. Worse, there’s something so very patronising and smug about the way he roams not just the Wheelers but the other marriages on the street to underline nothing but emptiness. How brave and sophisticated! In Annie Hall, Woody Allen took a pair of misfit bohemians and showed that all relationships carry compromise and disappointment on their backs. (And how he made us laugh).
Those 1950s movies were shining ersatz, but they were full of real feeling. Revolutionary Road, with its numb, low-cal nihilism, is just a Stepford Wife – pleasing, beautiful on the eye, and doing all the things you expect. But it’s empty inside.