Review: "Revolutionary Road"

A strange thing has happened to Revolutionary Road on its way to the screen: All the heat and passion of Richard Yates' esteemed 1961 novel, about a disintegrating marriage in 1955 Connecticut, have seeped out of the material. What you're left with is an impeccably shot, studiously staged, passionately acted bore, one of those curious fizzles in which everyone seems to do everything right, but the film simply refuses to take off.

Director Sam Mendes, who previously dissected suburban life so astutely in American Beauty, and screenwriter Justin Haythe, whose script is scrupulously faithful to Yates' novel, at least get the surface right. Mendes' roots in the theater come in especially useful in recreating the clean lines and unfussy details of 1950s Americana without drawing attention to the film's production design.

But shorn of the characters' interior monologues from the book, Revolutionary Road never lets us inside the heads of the unhappily married Frank and April Wheeler. As the warring couple, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet try their damndest to illustrate their characters' roiling dissatisfaction and boredom with their "trapped lives," as April describes them, a dissatisfaction they are prone to take out on each other.

But practically everyone involved with Revolutionary Road, in front of and behind the camera, seems to have gravitated toward the material out of intellectual curiosity instead of a true emotional connection. Watching DiCaprio and Winslet tear into each other with a viciousness only a married couple can muster, you don't feel the deep and bruising pain they're inflicting. Instead, you think it was probably a good thing after all that Jack and Rose didn't end up together when their ship sank.

Winslet, who has grown into one of the most ravishing actresses working in movies today, gives April's mood swings and ferocious anger a formidable dimension: It's a great performance stranded in a mediocre film, and you keep hoping the movie around her will step up and do her justice.

A somewhat miscast DiCaprio fares less well at portraying Frank's hypocritical nature and lack of ambition. Frank is a man in denial of the reality of his life, but DiCaprio only succeeds at capturing the pitiable aspects of the character. You don't buy him as a random adulterer, and you don't see how he could have ever snared a hellcat like April. When Frank talks about "the hopeless emptiness'' of suburbia, you can hear the screenwriter pecking away at his keyboard.

Revolutionary Road does come to life in a couple of scenes involving Michael Shannon as John, the mentally unbalanced son of Helen Givings (Kathy Bates), a friend of the Wheelers. John, who utterly lacks all social decorum, immediately sees through the placid act of bliss the Wheelers put on for their guests and calls them out on it. Those scenes are the only times when Revolutionary Road approaches the messy, unpredictable feel of life instead of a glossy contraption designed primarily to win Oscars.

Comments

[Connie]

I liked it a little more than you (if one can actually like a movie about people growing to hate each other), mostly because of Kate Winslet, who is terrific. But Michael Shannon really made the movie, which should have ended about 15 minutes before it did. I suspect that is RYates' fault, though.

[HoCo]

Maybe all it needs is a Celine Dion theme song.

[Chris]

But was American Beauty really that deep? "Look closer" it said. Thanks for the advice.