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.

Review: Tokyo Sonata (2.5/5)

Tokyo Sonata
(Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
Teruyuki Kagawa, Kyoko Koizumi, Yu Koyanagi, Kai Inowaki, Haruka Igawa.
Running time: 119 minutes. (IFI Club)

The dreaded ‘R’ word sends people shrinking into a corner as if they’ve just entered a room full of lepers. Spare a thought for the Japanese: they’ve been trying to shake recession for almost 20 years. Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa channels that economic gloom into this droll comedy drama.
Takashi (Yu Koyanagi), a pudgy-faced office worker, loses his job to outsourcing. (Blame it on the Chinese.) But he’s too proud and ashamed to tell his wife. So he leaves the house each day for work, refuses menial work at the job centre but is not too proud to queue up with the homeless for free lunch. The strain leads to cracks in his family: his wife Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi) develops a thousand-yard stare, their teenage son emigrates to the US army, while their youngest child takes sneaky piano lessons where it is discovered he is a child prodigy.
Tokyo Sonata touches on similar terrain to Time Out, Laurent Cantent’s Milleresque study of delusion and breakdown in a French man who still pretends he has a job. But Kurosawa wants to take traditional Japanese ideas of authority and kick it in the backside.
Takashi is put through the ringer until he discovers humility. With a gentle hand, Kurosawa teases out a dry humour. And then, unexpectedly, Tokyo Sonata jumps gear into borderline farce. It’s as if somebody decided to tack on the final reel of Magnolia, but dialed to 11. We get a bizarre burglary and kidnap, a hit and run and all sorts of coincidental silliness that robs the film of any heft it had.

Review: Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (2/5)

Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist
(Peter Sollett)
Michael Cera, Kat Dennings,
Alexis Dziena.
Running time: 90 minutes. (15A)


If Juno didn’t exist, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist would have had to invent it. Peter Sollett’s wistful indie romance has been manufactured to appeal directly to the Converse-gazing emo teens left tingling in Juno’s wake. But it has none of Juno’s wit, style or broad appeal. At best, it’s a bustling soundtrack in search of a movie.
Juno star Michael Cera, that quiet-spoken teenage-anxiety skeleton, plays Nick. He takes a “mental health day” off school and makes music compilations with titles such as ‘Road to Closure, Vol 12’. Alas, he has just been dumped by spoilt brat Tris (Alexis Dziena). After a concert with his band the Jerk-Offs, he is thrown accidentally into the arms of teen vamp Norah (Kat Dennings), and crazy ex-girlfriend decides she wants him back. The film goes to a lot of bother pretending that getting musical soulmates Nick and Norah together is going to require a lot of work. Not a bit of it. The plot, as boney as Cera’s left elbow, whisks them around Manhattan nightspots and touches briefly on something genuine: that cloudy nexus where Nick learns to untangle love (Norah) and lust (Tris). In one scene, Nick makes up his mind to ditch the sexy ex by window-wiping away a lipstick kiss she left on his windscreen. It’s a cute visual shorthand but the film offers little that is cinematic. Both Cera and Dennings have plenty to offer as actors, but they’re not a romantic fit. A film you should listen to on your iPod.