I’m divorced, and though my divorce was actually fairly gentle all things being equal, it does make me a little wary of checking out movies that are about marriages ending. That was, more or less, all I knew about Revolutionary Road, a movie where Titanic‘s onscreen lovers Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet are a married couple having a, shall we say, very rough time of it in 1950s America. Did I want to see something like that? There’s a good reason I haven’t seen Sophie’s Choice yet despite the fact it is on my HBO Watchlist.
Then again, I haven’t seen Titanic from start to finish either, largely because I like a good, crackling script and what few bits of that movie I have seen, the dialogue always sounds terrible to me. If anything, I can pretend the characters in this movie are what happened if Jack and Rose had both made it off the boat…
Frank (DiCaprio) and April Wheeler (Winslet) met a party one night and more or less hit it off. Frank was a clerk and longshoreman wondering what he wanted out of his life. April was an aspiring actress. Fast forward a couple years and the two are married, and not all that happily. Frank is stuck in a corporate sales job he hates while April’s own dreams were crushed, living out her own life as a wife and mother in the suburbs of Connecticut. The two fight, loudly, and this is, to put it bluntly, not a happy or healthy marriage as both Frank and April privately seem to be defensive or quick to read into each other with things that they may or may not mean to share. There’s a life of quiet (and sometimes very loud) desperation going on between the picture-perfect Wheelers. And, quite frankly, that looks to be true of other couples in the neighborhood, including their best friends Shep (David Harbour) and Milly Campbell (Katheryn Hahn). Shep clearly has a thing for April and Milly just looks like she wants to scream any time she is alone.
Side note: I have been seeing Katheryn Hahn in a lot of things lately, and I must say I approve of this recent development.
To help save the marriage, perhaps, April proposes the family move to Paris, a place April has never seen and Frank really liked when he was there. April would find work while Frank figured out what he wanted out of life, and the kids were young enough to adapt to the movie. This sort of spontaneous, pie-in-the-sky planning appears to be the sort of unthinking dreaminess that characterizes both Frank and April to one degree or another, and soon, outside factors seep in to prevent the two from going anywhere beyond continuing to wallow in their general unhappiness on Revolutionary Road.
When this movie was over, I had to check something: was this a play first? Director Sam Mendes, Winslet’s husband at the time, did have a theater background, and his break-out film American Beauty did feature the same themes of desperation in the American suburbs, but no, it was a novel first. I wondered as much because the whole thing feels much more like a theatrical production than a cinematic one as I was watching it. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing–I think Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? fits that category and is downright excellent, but it started as a stage play first–but here, not so much. DiCaprio in particular seems stilted in his delivery at times. Winslet is excellent as always, but I couldn’t say I cared for how DiCaprio played his character. Additionally, much of what the characters talk about feels…artificial is the best word I can think of to describe it. That this is ultimately a tragic story for Frank and April is set up from the beginning when they have their first fight. But that doesn’t mean it needs to feel like a stage play in its execution.
Indeed, much of this story seems set up to show the audience how terrible a couple Frank and April are, outside appearances aside. Both gave up dreams for the life they have, and both really aren’t dealing with that fact very well. Much of what they do seems designed to fix something that outward circumstances can’t fix. I’ve seen enough stories, print or performed, where a dream getaway is proposed that will not fix anything. There’s not much difference between Frank and April’s Paris talk as there is with Death of a Salesman‘s Willy and Biff Loman’s belief that Biff can use his past high school sports glory to get a former classmate to sponsor a sports league with him as the center of it all. Both plans are blatantly unrealistic and extremely idealistic, and yet all involved can’t see that until reality steps in and reminds them. Additionally, the more the audience sees of Frank and April, the less they look like a compatible couple that knows how to communicate with each other. Then again, that may describe the entire neighborhood as even the elderly couple that seems most content will end the movie with the husband turning down his hearing aid so he doesn’t have to listen to his wife. It’s a dream with no real likelihood of success designed solely to distract the dreamers from the reality of their actual lives.
The movie overall was well done, but I could not get past my perceived theatricality of this presentation to really consider this some sort of classic.
Grade: B
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