Revolutionary Road

The name Sam Mendes will always be associated with 'American Beauty', the tale of how one middle-aged couple decided to rebel against the stiffling environment of their uber-suburb.  If Mr. Mendes has a problem with this, he certainly did himself no favors by adapting Richard Yates' heartbreaking 1961 novel.   As with 'American Beauty', settling down is a compromise.  Dreams are crushed.  Our married couple finds a way to resent one another for the way their life has turned out.  And again, we're not entirely sympathetic with them.  You make your bed, you sleep in it.  The redeeming factor in 'American Beauty' was the comedy.  Watching our couple become childishly selfish was much easier when we could laugh at them.  In 'Revolutionary Road' though, it's just not fucking funny.

Our couple is Frank and April Wheeler, who meet and fall in love through sparse flashbacks that suggest they were meant to live their lives together to the fullest.  Two kids and one soul-crushing job later, they're living behind thick layers of houses and trees in the New York suburbs.  There are many shots of either of them looking out their windows with the neighborhood trees reflected in the glass, as if they're iron bars.  We feel a glimmer of hope as they decide to pack it in and move to Paris for a fresh, exotic start-over. They're so pleased with themselves that they tell the news to everyone with an uncontrollable smugness.  They're finally going to really live, and "really feel things", just like they always said they would.  Of course, life finds a way to keep them grounded; and they claw each other to bits before they can take off.  

Mendes' success is in the film's heartbreaking predictability.  When Frank and April are packing up and getting ready to live the beautiful life, we just know it's going to fall apart.  The journey to the film's grim ending is as seamlessly paced and subtle as it is painful.  Much of this bittersweet journey is owed to the much talked-about reunion between Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.  The two never lose any chemistry, whether fighting or gushing over their glorious future in Paris.   Their fight scenes together are brutal, with DiCaprio's fiery intensity nicely balanced by Winslet's deadpan cruelty.  But watching each actor suffering on their own is even more heartbreaking.  Arguably the film's saddest image comes near the end, with Winslet trying to wash the dishes while sobbing in her sun-soaked kitchen.  Another contender is the last shot of DiCaprio, watching his children play at the park with a whole tempest of emotions all over his face.  Also noteworthy are Kathryn Hahn and David Harbour as Frank and Aprils' equally stiffled neighbors (Though it's hard not to think of Kathryn Hahn telling John C. Reilly that she'd like to roll him up into a little ball and put him in her vagina).  

The film also succeeds in providing a fair and balanced critique for both of the Wheelers and doesn't ask us to be entirely sympathetic with them.  We know Frank loves his wife, but he just can't bring himself to put her happiness in front of him.  We know April is miserable, but she clearly is not sure what she wants.  If only the rest of 'Revolutionary Road' were as balanced.  In this world, the suburbs are just pure hell.  No one seems happy, with their home lives or their jobs.  Everybody's drinking a little too much.  There's no humor or joy in the film to put a little perspective of the Wheelers' pain.  It all feels a little overwrought. Michael Shannon has a small role as John, the son of their real estate agent and a former mathematician trying to recover from a mental breakdown (and who can't help seeming loosely based on John Nash).  As the Wheelers try to be hospitable to John, his lack of social graces forces them to admit their participation in the "hopeless emptiness" of their suburban lifestyle.  "Anybody can see the emptiness in it", he responds, "but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness".  For a story this natural and seamless, it's a strange choice to throw in this kind of character, as if to point everything out for us.  Furthermore, the Wheelers' children just don't seem to be around enough, as if having kids only exists to heighten the drama here and there.  

But for the handful of failures, the film never stops looking and feeling like an over-whelming success.  Mendes again reunites with composer Thomas Newman to give us the same icy piano notes that permeated throughout 'American Beauty'.  The sets and costumes recall the hustle-bustle world of early 1960's Manhattan that makes 'Mad Men' such a pleasure to watch.  The suits, the flirty and intimidated secretaries, the constant cigarette smoking, the miserable wives: it almost makes you feel that the show inspired Mendes to make 'Revolutionary Road'.  It's a wonderful setting for a story about people who don't want to deal with the lives they've chosen, and who don't realize how much they really do feel things, really feel them.