Revolutionary Road	by George Sax

Unholy Matrimony

Revolutionary Road is a film that communicates irresolution and a confusion of purposes. Despite, perhaps even because of, its often stridently histrionic tone, you can get the impression the people behind the film had some trouble coming to terms with the nature of their own project.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in Revolutionary Road

The trouble probably began with the source material, Richard Yates’ bitterly bleak 1961 novel of the same title. A series of stabs at adapting it over a forty-odd-year period were made and abandoned. When Kate Winslet got a hold of a script by newcomer Justin Haythe (this is only his second screenplay), she had the advantage of being wed to a bankable director, Sam Mendes, and a more than passing acquaintance with a male film luminary, former Titanic co-star Leonardo DiCaprio. Winslet has succeeded where others were frustrated. Well, sort of, anyway.

Revolutionary Road revolves around the blighted marriage of Frank and April Wheeler (DiCaprio and Winslet) and its accelerated deterioration over the course of the summer of 1955 in a leafy suburban setting of post-war prosperity, upwardly aimed socio-economic aspirations and barely suppressed discontents. The thirty-year-old Wheelers, as we learn, have secretly held themselves aloof from and superior to the materialistic, mass-cult, middle-class milieu they seem to navigate with grace. Though there is little if any evidence of any plausible basis for their sense of natural excellence, others vaguely share in the assumption. The agent who finds them a home (Kathy Bates) calls them “special,” and the male half of a neighboring couple who’s half in love with April eventually confesses that he regards the Wheelers as a glamorous exception to the stifling mediocrity.

By the time we meet them, however, the Wheelers are sinking into a moil of angry mutual recrimination. Frank has begun a half-hearted affair with a secretary at the big New York firm where he’s a bored, barely trying technical writer.

April, becoming more desperately dissatisfied with their life, proposes a solution: They’ll escape to Paris, where she’ll get a job and Frank will have the means “to find himself.” When this quasi-Fitzgerald-esque pipe dream evaporates, the couple’s crisis spirals into a tragic resolution.

Mendes and Haythe may well have grappled with the difficulties presented by Yates’ novel, but whether the result is attributable to it or their own mistakes, the film is wildly uneven in tone and emotionally unpersuasive. The clumsily depicted, overwrought intensity is probably chiefly Mendes’ fault.

The director, a product of the British theatre, has already turned out one highly regarded but spurious and attitudinizing critique of the emptiness of American middle-class life, 1999’s American Beauty. (The late critic Pauline Kael, in what was probably her last published interview, said exasperatedly, “The picture is a con. Can’t educated liberals see that it sucks up to them at every plot turn?”)

This time around, Mendes doesn’t seem certain just what he’s trying to get at. Is it a searing examination of the sometimes terrible close encounters of the matrimonial kind? A look at an early variety of soulless America’s consumerist society? The Wheelers aren’t the only confused subjects of unwarranted assumptions here. You can sense Mendes straining under his own dubious presumption of detachment, unable to focus on an approach to this young couple’s plight. The film seems to hover uncertainly between social satire, black comedy (the audience at one preview laughed at scenes that can’t have been intended as funny) and perceptive personal drama. With its meticulously created 50s setting, theatrically over-emphatic emotionality, and final devastating denouement, Revolutionary Road almost resembles an attempt by 50s soap-master Douglas Sirk (Magnificent Obsession) to interpret a savage August Strindberg play.

Mendes seems to have missed the only convincing take on this material: April is a victim of pre-Betty Friedan domestic imprisonment. Her immature, escapist illusions are juxtaposed with scenes of her performing such housewifely chores as potato peeling and child control. Had she even Frank’s limited Organization Man options she might feel a lot less hopelessly hemmed in. At least until the revolution.

In any event, Mendes and company had something more grandly, transcendentally tragic in mind. But they haven’t delivered on their vision, whatever it was.

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