"One thing I'm willing to bet [about a "Revolutionary Road" screenplay written in the 1970s] is that it made the Wheelers a lot more sympathetic than they ought to be. It was a common misconception when the book was first published, even among good critics. Quite simply, Yates meant for the Wheelers to seem a little better than mediocre: not, that is, stoical mavericks out of Hemingway, or glamorous romantics out of Fitzgerald. Rather, the Wheelers are everyday people -- you and me -- who pretend to be something they're not because life is lonely and dull and disappointing."
-- Richard Yates biographer Blake Bailey in Slate (June 26, 2007)
Plot and thematic spoilers ahead.
"How do you break free... without breaking apart"? That's the rhetorical question posed as a tag line in this trailer (above) for Sam Mendes' titanic version of Richard Yates' 1961 novel "Revolutionary Road," starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.
But is that what "Revolutionary Road" -- the movie or the book -- is about? Does it even scratch the surface? I wonder if this is being sold as a story about two extraordinary people who might have fulfilled their promise... if they hadn't been stifled by the suburban conformist pressures of America in the 1950s. If only they'd broken free and gone to Paris where people really feel things!
That isn't what it's about.
OK, so the trailer is only a sales pitch for the movie version, and "Revolutionary Road" would not be one of the great American novels if that's all there was to it. Bear with me; I know they're works in dissimilar media, and that one doesn't physically alter the existence of other. Having loved the book many years ago (and now that I'm re-reading it about six weeks after seeing the Mendes movie), I wonder how much of my interpretation of the movie and its performances were colored by the novel... and what the filmmakers' take on the novel is meant to be.
In the movie (and the trailer), April Wheeler (Winslet) says to her husband Frank (DiCaprio): "We're like everyone else! ... We've bought into the same ridiculous delusion... this idea that you have to settle down and resign from life." And, for her, being "like everyone else" is a fate worse than death. So, April persuades her husband that they must move to Paris because, he's told her, "People are alive there. Not like here."
Meanwhile, everyone else here -- at Knox Business Machines, on Revolutionary Road -- says the Wheelers are attractive and promising and destined for great things. They see themselves as extraordinary, too, and the unfulfilled or unfulfillable dreams they nurture are among their mechanisms for keeping that layer of denial intact. They'll always have Paris (even if neither of them ever did) because they need their idea of it to feel special. For Frank, at least, actually moving to Paris, therefore, poses a threat (and a gauntlet insidiously or unwittingly thrown down by April) that he isn't equipped to face.
In a superb New Yorker appreciation of Yates' work month, James Wood described the novel as a "nimbly prismatic" work that "does not allow us an easy point of agreement":
It seems to offer a familiar critique of the suburbs, of the kind we know from movies and books like "American Beauty" and "The Ice Storm," in which the streets are amok with hysterical housewives and angry soft men. [...]
Yet "Revolutionary Road" pointedly does not rely on those overfamiliar, superficial stereotypes. So it troubles me a little when a critic as good as Michael Wilmington (who, in fairness, notes that he hasn't finished the novel) writes in his review of the movie:
Yates, a bit like John Cheever, writes in that slightly dry, chiseled, ironic, luminous American prose that both castigates American middle class culture and, in an odd way celebrates it -- or at least celebrates the artists ensnared in it. The book is about how marriages collapse and how artists and would be artists or outsiders suffer in the more materialist realms of Eisenhower America, and that's a worthy subject.
Assuming that is so, it's only the tiniest piece of the subject of "Revolutionary Road."
Likewise, I am aware that Sam Mendes trying to promote his movie when he gives interviews, but this comes across as downright misleading -- unless (god forbid) he really thinks that's the primary focus of the book, and his movie:
It deals with this idea, that I think a lot of people -- friends of mine, contemporaries and even me myself at certain points have felt -- which is that you somehow find yourself living a life you hadn't quite expected and certainly one that you didn't really want to live. You find yourself compromising the ideals and the dreams you had when you were younger.
Todd McCarthy gets much closer to the mark in his Variety review of the movie. With an appropriately ambivalent mixture of regard and dissatisfaction, he describes it as "faithful, intelligent, admirably acted, superbly shot" and "a near-perfect case study of the ways in which film is incapable of capturing certain crucial literary qualities, in this case the very things that elevate the book from being a merely insightful study of a deteriorating marriage into a remarkable one."
Literature, movies and social commentary have all been down this road many times before, stressing the conformism of '50s upper-middle-class life, the emotional sterility of the suburbs, the hypocrisy of attitudes, the sexism, et al. What keeps all these too routinely accepted views safely in the background here is the stinging emotional truth that courses through the novel and, to a significant extent, the film, thanks especially to the electric, fully invested performances by the two leads. Frank and April are like a 20-years-younger George and Martha in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" who have yet to achieve an unstated equilibrium in their epic tug of war. [...]
With one notable exception toward the end, Haythe and Mendes capture the primal emotional and thematic points of the book as they try to find a cinematic way to express the subtext of Yates' prose, which most distinguishes itself through the precise expressions of minute changes in emotion, attitude and thought -- what might he say, what should she say, what does he feel, what's she really thinking, how did he and she react at the same moment? Even when the dramatic temperature is cranked up to high, the picture's underpinnings seem only partly present, to the point where one suspects that what it's reaching for dramatically might be all but unattainable -- perhaps approachable only by Pinter at his peak.
Wood suggests another reading:
"Revolutionary Road" is a brilliant rewriting of "Madame Bovary," with one signal difference -- at the end of Flaubert's novel, both Emma and Charles Bovary lose, because she commits suicide and her dull husband is utterly bereft. In Yates's savage inversion, the wife loses but the dull husband secretly wins: though deprived of wife and children, he prospers at work, and finally secures for himself the safe, settled world that his wife died trying to dislodge.
I hadn't thought of it that way, but I think I see what he's saying. Since I first read the book in the early 1980s, I've thought of "Revolutionary Road" and another Yates masterpiece, "The Easter Parade" (both newly published along with "Eleven Kinds of Loneliness" in a hardback Everyman's Library edition, with an introduction by Richard Price), as "Beast in the Jungle"-type stories, about (how to put it?) characters whose destinies become apparent to them only in retrospect, long after their course has been determined. Nothing extraordinary about that. (See Bailey's quote at the top of this post.)
The novel begins with a dress rehearsal for a doomed, amateurish production of "The Petrified Forest" by the Laurel Players. April is one of them, and she never gets over her feelings of failure, disappointment and shame -- or forgives her husband (the one who was supposed to rescue her from her fears of her own mediocrity) for witnessing it.
And yet, her greatest failure is her regard for Frank ("the most interesting person I've ever met"), who is thoroughly commonplace. Sure, he's a liar, a weakling and a phony -- but not in any particularly interesting way. He's a dime a dozen, and that's what's ludicrous and terrifying about him. Perhaps he's just a better actor than she is (I'm talking about Frank and April, not DiCaprio and Winslet), or perhaps she's just the best audience he's ever had.
Casting two beautiful movie stars as the role-playing, scene-staging Wheelers presents its own set of problems. Can we believe that Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio are ordinary people who behave as they do because they are deluded into thinking they're better than "everyone else"? I have my doubts. Surely star-power is what got this famously "difficult" project made after all these years, but how does it affect perceptions of the material itself? Could this be a case of "Atonement" syndrome, where a well-made movie actually discourages audiences from feeling the sharper point?
There's a frighteningly funny (passive-aggressive?) moment when April switches from petulant to passionate, and claims that she's been holding Frank back from achieving his dreams. They both acknowledge they aren't quite sure what those might be, but Frank is instinctively reverse-defensive, scared to death at the prospect of finding out:
"... I mean, who ever said I was supposed to be a big deal?"
"I don't know what you mean," she said calmly. "I think it might be rather tiresome if you were a big deal. But if you mean who ever said you were exceptional, if you mean who ever said you had a first-rate, original mind -- well, my God, Frank, the answer is everybody. When I first met you, you were ---"
"Oh, hell, I was a little wise guy with a big mouth. I was showing off a lot of erudition I didn't have. I was ---"
"You were not! How can you talk that way? Frank, has it gotten so bad that you've lost all belief in yourself?"
Well, no; he had to admit it hadn't gotten quite that bad. Besides, he was afraid he could detect a note of honest doubt in her voice -- a faint suggestion that it might be possible to persuade her that he had been a little wise guy after all -- and this was distressing.
I don't know quite how you would communicate all that in a movie, or a pair of performances.
Bailey wrote in his 2007 Salon piece:
Were Yates alive to advise Mendes, I daresay he'd insist that the movie begin, as the novel does, with April's mortifyingly awful performance in an amateur production of "The Petrified Forest." In other words, the Wheelers' doom should never be in doubt because they can't help being themselves. "When the curtain fell at last," Yates wrote, at the end of one of the most excruciating scenes in American literature, "it was an act of mercy."
The scene is in the movie, near the beginning, but we don't feel the panic, the flop-sweat or the tediousness of a bad performance. It doesn't feel excruciating. Later scenes, when the characters are staging dramatic confrontations at home as if they were amateur productions, are, but perhaps not precisely as the film intends. It's hard to tell.
* * * *
Michael Shannon's Academy nomination for "Revolutionary Road" is one of the most gratifying in this year's Oscar batch. He's magnificent as John Givings, the mentally unstable son of Kathy Bates' real estate agent. Wood beautifully describes how this character functions to illuminate the book:
Mrs. Givings's son, John, is a former mathematician who has suffered a breakdown and has been taken to a mental hospital by the state troopers. He is occasionally let out, and twice visits the Wheelers. At one point during his first visit, Frank condemns "the hopeless emptiness of everything in this country," and John Givings eagerly agrees: "Now you've said it. The hopeless emptiness. Hell, plenty of people are on to the emptiness part; out where I used to work, on the Coast, that's all we ever talked about. We'd sit around talking about emptiness all night. Nobody ever said 'hopeless,' though; that's where we'd chicken out. Because maybe it does take a certain amount of guts to see the emptiness, but it takes a whole hell of a lot more to see the hopelessness." This has the ring of an authorial statement, the leathery, hard-won "honesty" for which Yates is praised. (Blake Bailey's absorbing biography is titled "A Tragic Honesty.") And John Givings's status as an outcast, a mental patient who sees through the congealed horror, lends him a seerlike authority. But remember that it was the thoroughly inauthentic Frank Wheeler who supplied the easy Conradian phrase "the hopeless emptiness of everything," and who, pages earlier, denounced the suburbs for locking up people like John Givings:
Wasn't this, he asked, a beautifully typical story of these times and this place? A man could rant and smash and grapple with the State Police, and still the sprinklers whirled at dusk on every lawn and the television droned in every living room. . . . "Call the Troopers, get him out of sight quick, hustle him off and lock him up before he wakes the neighbors. . . . It's as if everybody's made this tacit agreement to live in a state of total self-deception."Once again, just as we quickly reach for our own preferred weapon of condemnation--yes, we say to ourselves, how very true is this "beautifully typical story of these times and this place," how right this book is about "the hopeless emptiness of everything"!--we find the novel judging our own judgmentalism, qualifying our superiority. And the novel escapes, somehow, to live another, more complicated and mysterious life.
Does the movie? I don't think that it does, or know that it can. McCarthy writes that "film is incapable of capturing" that "prismatic" quality Wood describes in Yates' prose:
In the film, it appears Frank makes his move on an almost arbitrary impulse, and he's made to look bad in the typically chauvinistic way he uses his superior position to seduce a powerless young woman. On the page, the two already have a history marked by a long mutual flirtation, and Maureen is described as sexier and less frumpy than the woman who turns up onscreen. Frank may be a cad either way, but in the novel, his cheating involves an array of ambiguous feelings on both sides -- anticipation, hesitation, delight, remorse, Frank's subsequent temptation to confess -- while in the film it registers only one meaning: naughty boy.
It's delusory to criticize a film for not being a book, or a dance for not being a painting. Even when one is an "adaptation" of another, they are separate works by different artists, and each form has unique properties and capabilities. I took the time to write this because of my love of the book, not out of some "hatred" for the movie, which I didn't hate. I guess you could just say I found it reductive. ("Phil thought it was flawed.") In my view, it reduced aspects of the novel without finding significant ways of enhancing it in other dimensions (direction, performance).
Here, perhaps, is an illustration of the challenge in adapting a work like "Revolutionary Road." (I'm going to write about the very ending now.) Yates concludes his novel with Mrs. Givings going on and on about the Wheelers to her husband:
"It's just that they were a rather strange young couple. Irresponsible. The guarded way they'd look at you; the way they'd talk to you; unwholesome, sort of. Do you know what I came across in the cellar? All dead and dried out? I came across an enormous box of sedum plantings that I must have spent an entire day collecting for them last spring. I remember very carefully selecting the best shoots and very tenderly packing them in just the right ind of soil -- that's the kind of thing I mean, you see. Wouldn't you think that when someone goes to a certain amount of trouble to give you a perfectly good plant, a living, growing thing, wouldn't you think the very least you'd do would be to ---"
But from there on Howard Givings heard only a welcome, thunderous sea of silence. He had turned off his hearing aid.
Mrs. Givings' monologue is callous and irritating and petty (even monstrous in some respects, given the context), yet you also sense the power the Wheelers had over her, the way they made her feel uncomfortable, unworthy, insulted. They hurt her feelings. You can decide for yourself how much of that comes across in the movie, but here's what doesn't: the past-tense in the last sentence. In the film, we see Howard Givings turn down his hearing aid, and the film's sound drops with it. Fade to black. The subtlety of the inexact timing is missing. The effect is not the same.
How could it be?
P.S. From a NY Times Book Review essay by novelist Richard Ford that I just now read for the first time, and that brought tears to my eyes:
The story line of "Revolutionary Road" can be summarized succinctly:
In the spring and summer of 1955, in the western Connecticut bedroom community of Revolutionary Hill Estates, the lives of the young Wheeler family -- April, Frank and two minor children -- become essentially and violently unglued, never ever to be as they were. [...]
There are moments in reading "Revolutionary Road" when I'm made to wonder exactly which human qualities its author would finally sponsor as both virtuous and practicable. What would prove adequate to hold the fabric together long enough to get through life in one acceptable piece? Clearly something more's required than the standard livelihood protocols - the train, the office, advancement, collegiality - since all lead to other postures of controlled collapse. Marriage qua marriage is also plainly not adequate. Likewise parenting. Paris -- the old, fragrant dream of freedom -- seems out of reach.
Clearly some more straitened form of life is required, one in which what we say strictly corresponds to what we mean. We also might not care to ask very much of others. And there might not be that much fun around. Indeed, Yates's dark humor seems calculated less to please us than, as with any satire, to soften us up for the sterner truths.
And there's no escaping stern truth here. But goodness knows there's so much along the way to like and admire that, stern truths or no, you're sorry when it's over -- sorry in more ways than one. Mostly "Revolutionary Road" is just so smart and keen and shockingly inventive about everything it turns its imagination to: about being young and blissfully rudderless in New York City before the responsibilities of marriage and family cloud the sky; about entertaining the awful neighbors; about long, long business lunches; about being 30 and feeling middle-aged; about fearing change when you know change is likely to save you; even about the pink light seen through a poor man's earlobe, palely summing up all of humanity's frailty and failure...
Charles Bovary was the hero of that book. But Flaubert himself might not have known that, so it's reasonable that Yates (and many [most]) others wouldn't.
Having read Revolutionary Road last year, I enjoyed the movie for its faithfulness and its performances. But ultimately I think the reason the novel is a great one and the movie merely a good one is that films with a similar level of beautiful production design and cinematography, of skilled direction and flawless performances, are much less rare than novels as complex and enjoyable on the sheer level of sentence to sentence prose as Revolutionary Road. I have seen plenty of movies as well made (or better), but few books as well-written.
I agree that the movie is reductive, but I think they did just about as well as you can do. And there are pieces of the movie that hold up very, very well. My favorite moment is when Mendes cuts from the young and beautiful star couple to them in the car, old and wrinkled and harshly lit--I think it's a great way to get across one of Yates' most prominent themes, the loss or destruction of that which was once promising (or, well, appeared promising anyway).
Jim,
Did you ever share your thoughts on "Atonement"? Your comparison intrigued me.
JE: I was referring to a surreal experience I had in the big, ornate Elgin theater in Toronto the year "Atonement" premiered in the festival. It had to do with the casting and the narrative device used for the epilogue. I wrote about it here:
http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2007/09/tiff_2007_stuck_in_time.html
Its unfair to ask a person what Revolutionary Road is about. Rather, its unfair to expect that person to reduce it to a mere few sentences, criminally, one.
The movie certainly focuses in on the idea of the dead parts of the suburb, and the death of a marriage. But so many key statements are in there, that bring it beyond those two subjects. Simple statements, such as "It didn't have to be Paris," show that its not about moving to Paris. When coupled with statements about how the town they are in can be alive, and fun, it shows that its not about where they are, but what they create for themselves.
They created their own deadness. Leo's cheating, was partly because it seemed to be one of the only ways he could feel masculine. But of course he always regretted it.
I found the movie to be very good. And even if it failed to evoke all the messages, all the grandness, of the novel; at least it got part of it through.
p.s. Michael Shannon should have been nominated last year for Bug. And he should have won.
JE: "Its unfair to ask a person what Revolutionary Road is about. Rather, its unfair to expect that person to reduce it to a mere few sentences, criminally, one." That is indeed the problem with attempting to capsule-synopsize any work of art. I wonder what kind of advertising tag line you could use for an adaptation of "RR" that suggested more, and was truer to its tone and scope? As for the movie itself, I do wish it got more of Yates' humor. Oh, and I think "Bug" (and Shannon's performance) was inexplicably overlooked. Best Friedkin movie in decades, too.
also the biggest problem for me with Revolutionary Road isn't that it lacked whatever it was that gave the novel its extra oomph, rather it's that it lacks the inherent (and in this case really really necessary) mediative effect of being written in language and having to be read, understood, thought about, visualized, and then remembered as read, understood, thought, visualized. to actually SEE and HEAR these people doing these things is highly unpleasant, so much so that meanings, intended or otherwise, tend to get lost. i just really, really hated watching these two people be awful to each other for two hours. i don't think anything should be off limits for a filmmaker, anything can make a good film, but it's 'not what it's about, but how it's about it'. there has to be some less unpleasant/ more artistic (ie, somehow edifying, if not also always enjoyable) way of handling a marriage like this, and the plight of ordinary people who think theyre not ordinary, and have been victimized by circumstance. this film had got on my nerves within ten minutes, and never let up.
I'm forced to admit here that I've neither seen the film nor read the book. Based on what I've heard, I find it likely I'd be much more interested in seeing the film if I had read the book.
This being the case, reading your article (and attempting to lightly skim over potential spoilers) what interests me most isn't the specific case, but the general idea of how film/novel adaptations should work. Obviously each medium has its strengths and weaknesses. In film, it's very difficult to have the same thematic depth as a novel, for a variety of reasons, chief among them film's intolerance for over-crowding of words, the need to act more or less in "real-time" (whereas a novel can always stop and explain or exemplify), and pure length.
Film's advantages, of course, lie more in aesthetics. However beautiful the English language can be, it's difficult for the printed word to compete aesthetically with images and music. (Otherwise the bookstore tradition of putting quotations all over the walls would have replaced wall-paper years ago!)
The media can try and mix up these advantages (novels by combining art, as in comic books or illustrated works, and film with freeze-frames, words on screen, etc. but neither is truly capable of everything the other is. I'd argue that, if anything, video games are the "super-medium" that could effectively combine the strengths of both, but that's another argument entirely.)
So here's my question: The film Revolutionary Road was doomed, more or less, to be thematically less complete and satisfying than its source material. And I would argue that that diminished depth makes it possible to justify making a film on the simple basis of watching a performance--even if Winslet and DiCaprio had turned in the best performances of their already impressive careers, wouldn't they have been undercut in some way by that missing depth? Wouldn't it still be better, all around, to read the book and see the characters in full, much as you point out it's better to watch the real Frost/Nixon tapes than see Frost/Nixon?
The other option, of course, is aesthetic--does this film have something especially aesthetically interesting to add? This is one of the (several) reasons that 2001: A Space Odyssey is a better film than a book. Whereas the novel, if anything, is guilty of over-explaining, the aesthetic power of the movie makes it clear that explanations are beyond the point. Is there something in the novel of Revolutionary Road that lends itself to that kind of aesthetic interpretation, where the loss of a certain amount of subtext may be excused or even desirable in order to create an aesthetic experience that services the overall story?
Again, I don't know, but it doesn't really sound like it--and it certainly doesn't sound like the people who produced the film had any such thing in mind when they did so. And if they had--would it have felt tacked on, like a gimmick used to justify the translation, or would it have felt like an organic part of the story, just waiting to be put on film? Will you say "This is a great aesthetic idea--but it could belong to any movie, so why didn't these people produce their own work that this aesthetic idea could ideally service and leave the novel alone?"
To be blunt: Does the film have a reason to exist beyond what's already contained in the novel?
There's a fall-back, of course: The film has a reason to exist because it reaches an audience the novel might not. Rightly or not, there are people who are much happier to watch a two-hour film than read a novel that might take them ten or twenty hours to finish, and plenty of people who just prefer the experience of watching a film. In which case, I suppose the question becomes: Is the film, reduced as it is from the novel, still contain enough that's worthwhile to make it valuable? Or has a translation in which much is lost and little is added rendered it unremarkable?
"Rightly or not, there are people who are much happier to watch a two-hour film..."
Not this one. This one's a trial. And the very real unpleasantness of it is kind of a mean trick, considering the casting. I know girls who, though not dumb, are not literary, and like many girls of certain ages, love Kate and Leo and fondly remember Titanic, and were legitimately excited to see this. Until they saw this. I also know a lot of highbrow people who, for various reasons, were either unsatisfied with or downright hostile towards the film they'd seen. And hearing their (very fair, in most cases) complaints, I realized they were about problems that were almost inherent in the adaptation.
Which does lead one back to Stephen's question - was there a really compelling reason to make this movie? I don't think there was.
Jim -- thanks for bringing this all together and crafting it so well. RR is a movie and a book that tugs at me and will continue to tug at me for years to come. I continued to be intrigued by it and I feel like there's so much to it that no critic or theorist can appropriately and adequately dissect it. We can only scrape the surface, because I think it hits close to home for many people... marriage, living in America, expectations, etc. This was one of the better assessments I've read. Thanks again :-)
Perhaps I'm in the minority but I didn't care for this movie, and I thought — of all pictures — that Close Encounters of the Third Kind captured these themes better.
Richard Dreyfuss' character was similarly ordinary, but really wanted to believe he was extraordinary. The Wheelers had Paris. He had outer space. But he was so convinced about how special he was that he left it all behind and got on the spaceship!
That movie left bigger questions in my mind than Revolutionary Road which, while well crafted, simply made me think that diagnoses for depression were different then. As someone who struggles with depression, the Wheelers (especially the wife) were pretty clearly manic depressive to me. All the signs were there and had zero to do with the suburbs. Maybe this was part of the point, but those characters would have been miserable anywhere. Ho-hum.
Dreyfuss' character wasn't exactly depressed. He was simply stressed out, having a bit of a mid-life crisis, and yearned for more. That makes for more compelling drama to me, and his act at the end was a more powerful anti-suburbs and anti-American-dream statement.
"In my view, it reduced aspects of the novel without finding significant ways of enhancing it in other dimensions (direction, performance)."
Completely agreed with this assessment; it doesn't surprise me that Mendes's explanation of his own film is a disturbingly superficial version of the novel. Besides, I've always had a certain disliking towards directors who explained their own work (shouldn't the work explain itself? why the need to further comment?). Haneke is another name I can think on the top of my head that does the same thing.
I guess when your work is simple and rather insignificant, artistic insecurities surface and make you babble about your own work.
About Michael Shannon though, I agree with Stephanie Zacharek in that I think he was "desperately overplaying". Among the five nominees, I think he is the one who least deserves to be there.
I don't suppose you've seen John Podhoretz's review of "Revolutionary Road," in this week's/last week's Weekly standard? Basically he says that April Wheeler is an absolutely horrible person who deserves everything she gets. Having read neither the novel or the movie, I can't say I'm sympathetic to a writer who suggests that most people shouldn't look beyond their middlebrow horizons. Instead they should know their place and realize how inferior they are to real artists, like Yates, whose artistic achievement consists of showing how superior he is to such people.
JE: I just Podhoretz's review, and I don't think that's what he's saying. He focuses on one dimension (pitiless satire) -- and I think he has some valid things to say about that aspect of it -- but it's not a one-dimensional book, and it isn't condescending in tone. Yates' prose strikes many (dissonant) chords at once, and the range, complexity and ambivalence are electrifying. If "Revolutionary Road" was just a book-long put-down (or parody without empathy), I doubt its reputation would have lasted and grown, against all odds, over the years.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000%5C000%5C016%5C068xzysv.asp?pg=1
"Without the dual effect of Yates's portrait of an unhappy marriage made more unhappy by excuses and fantasies generated by popular culture, 'Revolutionary Road' [the movie] is simply an off-putting portrait of marital bile generated by two uninteresting people."
Thank you is all I can say.
-Anthony
Jim, that TIFF blog entry you wrote about Atonement makes me miss the days when you loved movies instead of spending all your time trying to prove they're bad.
(This is said with a knowledge of the ambiguities of your viewpoint and the shades of grey present here... but c'mon.)
This is a great entry, by the way, and I like that you liked the book.
JE: Think of it this way, Josh: Is it possible to "prove" a movie is "bad"? That's not the way I look at it. If I didn't love movies I wouldn't care enough to try to show why I don't value some as much as others -- even if they're getting plenty of acclaim elsewhere. I've found it a disappointing year for mainstream "award-hopeful" releases, and I think it's worth talking about why. If I were to praise the kind of filmmaking I see in "TDK" or "Slumdog," it would pretty much invalidate what I love in movies I feel are really good/great -- and movies in general. I gotta stick up for my aesthetic values (or standards or tastes or however you may characterize them)...
Jim points out that 'naughty boy' scene. OK... that's one way to look at it. Another person might say... well if it was a sexier, livelier girl he's cheating with... maybe we can understand it easier? But with the shy, Jim used the word 'frumpy' and not-exactly-Frank's-type girl he does cheat with, I couldn't help but ask... "When you've got Kate Winslet at home?" Their relationship must really be THAT strained by their lifestyle.
If it's not Kate-the-godess-Winslet and Leo-basically-every-girl-loves-Dicaprio, we might not be shocked that he would cheat on his wife or that he would sleep with the girl he does. With all due respect to the girl, if Frank could make April fall for him, and he's got the looks and charm he does, couldn't he do... I don't wanna say better but... more 'his type'? But that's how trapped he's become by the 9 to 5. Unless he's lucky enough to run into some 'sexier, less frumpier' girl on his way home from work, frumpy is all he's got.
Here's another interesting contrast of casting: Kate and Leo versus everybody else. Frank and April then do seem like moviestars, intentionally, I can only assume, by Sam Mendes; Frank and April do seem out of place or, perhaps, meant to be 'special'. Even their demeanor when hanging out with others is different. But, as we get to know them we see their flaws. And, we can't help but wonder, would these flaws be overcome in a different environment? Had April's acting career been successful would these two seem more in place with the movie stars of that era? I think so.
So what you're ultimately seeing here is two people who are, flat out... in the wrong place at the wrong time (though perhaps no time would ever be right for them in that place). Yes, they have flaws... but the flaws are only excruciatingly noticeable when they are in that situation.
I felt like the two leads were perfect for portraying what makes Frank and April flawed but also what makes them special... which to me seems important because... if they can't get out of the mundane existence, how the hell are us average joes gonna make it?
But if the characters had not been stars and had been more average in appearance and demeanor... I wouldn't have got that out of the film.
But, then of course, who says anything would be fixed if they got to Paris? Nobody. But they know for sure what'll happen if they stay. Or do they? Are they fulfilling their own prophecy by having the prophecy?
This is all complex enough for my liking... and I can only assume is over the head of the average filmgoer. Hopefully some can think. If they do, I think they'll get quite a lot out of it. Apparently people here hardly got anything... I come back to one of my favorite Ebert lines: "It is useful to be aware of the ways in which real people see real films."
But, I know, people here are just speaking for themselves and their standards, not whether they'd recommend the film to the thousands of couples still to this day in a situation like Frank and April...
The book might be better and the movie not a classic but can anybody deny that the movie will hit many people like a ton of bricks... and in a mere couple of hours?
JE: Karlos, thanks for that interpretation. I should point out that the "frumpy" and "naughty boy" references are quotations from Todd McCarthy, not mine. (I didn't think she was so frumpy in the movie; she seemed more alive with possibilities than he did to me.) McCarthy was giving an example of how the movie reduced the novel's complex dynamics to a fairly simple terms, and that's the context in which I introduced that quote from his review.
This was easily the worst movie I saw all year. As with American Beauty, I found it to be dripping with smug condescension. And as with AB, I felt the characters were whipped about by the vicissitudes of the plot to the point that their reactions seemed almost entirely random. Frank wants to go to Paris - he has shallow 1 minute conversation with guy he can't stand - now Frank wants to be a good worker again. And as with AB, I found the acting to be painfully overwrought to the point where I not only had trouble watching it, but felt embarrassed for the actors, esp for poor Kathy Bates in a role that is so crass and so caricatured and so unconvincing it's almost like watching Annette Benning in AB all over again.
I've come to the conclusion that I simply don't know the same people that Sam Mendes does. I don't mean that we don't hang out in the same circles. I'm referring to homo sapiens. Humans as a concept. There is nothing that Mendes presents about the human condition that I find plausible or even recognizable.
I sarcastically observed about Am. Beauty that Mendes had made a bold creative choice in making a film about an alien race that merely looked human. I felt the same way about RR. It's not that I don't find the story plausible. It's the moment to moment actions and reactions of the characters that simply look... well, alien to me. And actions are never simply performed, they are all performed "with meaning" - ever moment is laden with its own staggering significance.
I must also confess to a complete disgust for suburban malaise cinema. The suburbs - where everyone's a hypocrite, where everyone is cheating on everyone else, and people are only lying to themselves if they think they're happy there.
It's old. I realize it wasn't old when the book (which I have not read) was written. But it's old and tired and offensive right now. Whit Stillman spoke up in defense of the bourgeoisie in "Metropolitan." We need someone to speak up for the suburbs. It would actually be a rather transgressive act after a cinema consisting of one cheap attack on suburbia after another.
JE: "... Mendes had made a bold creative choice in making a film about an alien race that merely looked human." Love that! I was waiting for you to weigh in on this one, Chris! Having read the novel (even if it was 20 or so years ago), I spent much of my time and energy during the movie trying to figure out what it was doing with these characters and this story, unsure of what the movie was providing and what I was bringing to it from my long-ago memories of the novel. In researching and writing this post I've come to think that Mendes may well believe that suburbia is the cause of human behavior rather than a manifestation of it. There are moments when I think Winslet and DiCaprio read deliver their lines in ways that suggest multiple/ambiguious/ambivalent readings, but the movie doesn't support them with a context in which they can be read that way. So, they come across as screeching aliens in Skinner boxes... with picture windows.
I came to the film without having read the novel so for me, the time period seemed almost incidental. I loved the movie. Perhaps I identified too strongly with the Wheelers: Dreamers who want something more for themselves but who end up wimping out and taking the easy path and paying the price for it. Both Wheelers could easily have been turned into negative portrayals, but I found myself sympathizing with both of them. I wanted them to take that chance and head to Paris, even though rationally I knew it probably would be a bad idea and wouldn't happen so it made the denoument all the more powerful.
Is it possible to "prove" a movie is "bad"? That's not the way I look at it. If I didn't love movies I wouldn't care enough to try to show why I don't value some as much as others
I don't say whether he's right or wrong, but if THIS is your best answer, he might have been on to something...
As for Mendes, I don't like his movies or his people, but - I am unable to dismiss the man who made Road to Perdition. I just can't do it. It's a deliberately cold, stately movie, yet somehow the emotions in it and its entire everything feel much more emotionally convincing than these movies in which characters 'emote'. I really love that movie. Stephanie Zacherek (sp?) used the opportunity of its release to say Mendes made movies like someone who hated them, which was a good line she used only because it was a good line, as it never seemed less true than just then. That it's since seemed to be proven true doesn't lessen, in my mind, the achievement of that particular film. And any filmmaker who's got an arrow like that in his quiver cannot be dismissed altogether. Not by me. I'll keep watching his films, if only to be amazed that such a bad filmmaker once made such a good film.
JE: I'm with you on that one. Seems to me "Road to Perdition" (which I've only seen once, long ago) stands above and apart from his other movies. I remember seeing "American Beauty" before it was released, when I had no idea who the director was, and thinking: "This is directed like a play, not a movie." I don't think he hates movies; I think he just doesn't see in movie terms most of the time. But something about "Road to Perdition" makes me want to see it again...
Oh! Sorry about that Jim. (Todd's quote, not yours.)
I've gotta stop reading the blog when I haven't had any sleep...
Just to respond to some of Chris' comments...
Maybe it's because I've lived in the suburbs most my life (that is, until recently), feel like the movie in many respects isn't that far off, and, as I said, have known a couple (my own age) like The Wheelers (who do seem to have these alien, sometimes random reactions that are, on closer inspection, laced with meaning) maybe that somehow helps me accept the movie as much closer to the truth than you're making it out to be. And I think it's important too to remember the movie is deliberately trying to manipulate the audience as many films do.
On the other hand, I just saw Gus Van Sant's "Paranoid Park" the other day. While I didn't feel like I got as much out of it as I did "Revolutionary Road", its almost-dead-on scene to scene portrayals of contemporary youth never seemed overly contrived and I think there's something to be said, at some point, whether realistic portrayals of people are more important than semi-realistic portrayals laden with significance.
And I wanna add one criticism I did have of the film... or something that seemed strange to me and perhaps this is what's missing from portrayals of the suburbs on screen these days... (or, actually, it seems missing to me in most movies, except Judd Apatow comedies...)
Do none of these characters have friends they keep in touch with?
I don't just mean neighborhood friends. Frank is from the city... surely there'd be somebody there he could call up and vent his suburban angst to. And a girl like April doesn't go through life without making many friends... in my opinion... even if none of them are close, not having close friends is one thing, non-existent is another...
That extreme (contrived) isolation is one area where the movie will not ring true with contemporary audiences. These days, you're not THAT trapped. For example, here I am on the internet. Who living in the suburbs does not have the internet now?
I can't wait for movies to start considering how contemporary means of communication like the internet has drastically changed the way people interact... and keep in touch... and see the bigger world beyond theirs. And what the positive and negative effects of that are. Especially in suburbia.
Though, all this considered, I also want to point out that movies always shape themselves to make a focused argument. And most of us live more alone than we might think. So that's something to counter my argument.
"Think of it this way, Josh: Is it possible to "prove" a movie is "bad"? That's not the way I look at it. If I didn't love movies I wouldn't care enough to try to show why I don't value some as much as others -- even if they're getting plenty of acclaim elsewhere. I've found it a disappointing year for mainstream "award-hopeful" releases, and I think it's worth talking about why. If I were to praise the kind of filmmaking I see in "TDK" or "Slumdog," it would pretty much invalidate what I love in movies I feel are really good/great -- and movies in general. I gotta stick up for my aesthetic values (or standards or tastes or however you may characterize them)..."
Yes, Jim, I understand that. But I see a world where you would have seen the charm in Atonement and reacted to it with the same kind of dislike you've shown Synecdoche, Slumdog, Doubt, Dark Knight, etc...
It seems like you used to be charmed by a movie's little inventions and choices, and now you wish they would play it straight. I dunno. I could write a research assignment on the way I feel the tone of this blog has changed, I think, but I'm not sure you'd agree; your moods seem to hold a strong sway over it, and that's inevitable, but I come here dreading now the latest film you've cynically torn down instead of open mindedly enjoyed.
I'm sure that came off about as stupid as it sounded when I typed it, but I guess, as a young filmmaker currently in school for the art, I don't really like the offhanded way you lately seem to deal with films you dislike; it seems like you write a blog to backhandedly insult films under the guise of dealing with some larger issue. I really do miss the Jim who dealt skeptically with The Departed, instead of dismissively, and who wrote loving tribute after loving tribute to No Country, a truly lovely film and one of the greatest theater experiences of my life.
Maybe I'm saying I miss the Jim who agreed with me. I suppose that would make me a sort of hypocrite.
I dunno though. It just seems like lately I read a post on Pineapple Express and a post on Doubt and it seems like whether you enjoyed or hated either movie was totally arbitrary, and whether you enjoyed or hated one of the movie's experiential central conceits is equally as arbitrary.
JE: It's not arbitrary. I have been greatly disappointed by the lackluster movies of this season -- ever since Toronto in September. There's been little I even cared enough about to engage with very deeply... because I don't think most of them go very deep. Maybe that's what you're sensing. Compare last year's (exceptional) best picture Oscar race to this year's, for example: I don't have a dog in this year's race. But last year there was plenty to get into with "NCFOM," "There Will Be Blood" (a movie I criticized more than I admired), "Michael Clayton," "Juno" and "Atonement." I'm sorry, but I can't pretend to get excited about the mediocre prospects this year.
I haven't actually written about "Doubt" -- just saw a strange trailer a while back and quoted a humorous paragraph from someone else's review. I didn't see it for myself until yesterday, and I'm writing about it now. I quite enjoyed it as a broad sketch comedy (Streep is hilarious -- she'll probably win another Oscar for this one), and I'm interested in discussing what kinds of "doubts" it raises, or if that is even the right word for what it does...) The two best things I've seen in two weeks: M. Night Shyamalan's "Unbreakable" from 2001 (which makes fascinating choices for imagining a non-cliched comic book world), and Nina Paley's animated musical Ramayana, "Sita Sings the Blues," which hasn't been released yet because of copyright problems. It's a multi-layered delight. Things are looking up.
Calling a movie like RR "easily the worst movie I saw all year" reeks of smug, disingenuous, reactionary film criticism. It has faults sure, but it has good qualities and is clearly better than most of the cinematic bathos put out on a yearly basis. Is anyone seriously trying to suggest this is EASILY worse than Disaster Movie or The Happening or Speed Racer?
JE: I don't presume to speak for Christopher Long (he does that splendidly for himself), but of course it rests on your definition of "worst." I wrote something (as an aside in a post on another subject) that I think addresses this a while ago, in which I argued that a film that risks tackling a difficult subject and fails to rise to the challenge can wind up being a far more serious offense to the art of the movies than a disposable genre exercise, which isn't likely to register very strongly with anyone, anyway. I think a film like the Oscar-nominated "Mississippi Burning," for example, encourages (actually teaches) racism in the way it exploits stereotypes (racists: ugly potato-heads; African-Americans: helpless victims). More here:
http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2008/12/critics_better_love_the_dark_k.html#more
To be fair, calling The Happening or Speed Racer the worst movie of the year is equally smug. It may not be reactionary but it's basic bandwagonism. I can understand why somebody might think that Rev. Road is the worst movie of the year although I don't agree (nor do I agree that The Happening or Speed Racer are the worst movies of the year...though I haven't seen Disaster Movie).
I DO agree with the opinion that Mendes directs like a stage and not film director. At no point in Rev Road could I get past the fact that the characters just seemed like actors on a stage. Maybe it was part of the point.
Why is that every time somebody dares to question a film that has critical or mass acceptance, there's always somebody out there ready to pounce and accuse him or her of being "smug" or a "poseur" or whatever. Has it ever occurred to you that people might have differing opinions than you or the general consensus? I don't understand reactions like this, and I don't think I ever will.
I did not see Speed Racer or Disaster Movie, so I can't speak to them. I saw The Happening and that was atrocious, but it was merely bad, not offensive. As Jim alludes to above, that's the difference, at least for me, between something that is simply forgettably awful and something that sticks in my craw.
It's a movie that isn't just BAD but one that promotes an ideology or even just a basic thesis that I find completely false. The reason I cite "American Beauty" as the single worse film I have ever seen (and yes I mean that, and yes I have thought about it quite a bit and, like Jim, I formed my opinion about it before hearing a word about its critical reception) is because my primary reaction to that film was to (figuratively) stand up and shout "Liar! Nothing you're saying is true! People do not act like this. The world does not work like this. And you're trying to tell me it is. " Is it better photographed than many terrible films? Sure. Is the acting better? Well,no, actually, it isn't. But it is inarguably more technically accomplished than many "bad" films. Does that matter? Not really. Because it's so self-important and so false that it's downright nauseating.
Movies like "Yor the Hunter" or "Krull" can't produce such a reaction. They don't qualify for "worst" status because they barely exist. This is a tacit acknowledgment that there IS substance to a film like Revolutionary Road or American Beauty or Crash, but that that substance is toxic.
I'll admit, however, that "easily" the worst was perhaps over-reaching. "The Reader" and "Chapter 27" were close contenders for the title. But it's hard to get to worked up about "Chapter 27." It's just disposable nonsense.
Am seeing this week (late birthday present) CAN'T WAIT!!! :)
I want to make a comment here, but I'd like to make two qualifiers first.
1. I've been reading bits and pieces of these posts and comments on RR while trying to avoid anything that might actually spoil it for me. I have no direct opinion concerning RR.
2. I don't find much enjoyment in the theater. I love to read plays, but when watching one I find it difficult for my mind to get past the fourth wall. At every moment I'm aware that I'm sitting in a seat, and 30 yards away there are some people pretending to be other people in a totally different place.
Here goes.
Sam Mendes' films have been referred to as "theatrical" or "stagey" a number of times. It's been said as if that must be a bad thing. Is it necessarily?
I'm asking this because cinema obviously has it's history rooted in the theater. We've spent a history of criticism praising filmmakers who distance themselves from theatrical conventions. But I look at a number of silent films to see that camera placement is nothing more than a front and center seat at a play. Acting held fast to staginess until the early 50's. Is that sort of acting always bad? No. Is that sort of camera placement always bad? No, not if you're a Howard Hawks fan.
These questions stem from the fact that "Baby Doll", "12 Angry Men", "The Petrified Forest", "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance", "Rear Window", and "The Set-Up" are some of my favorite films. All of them have varying degrees of theatrical influence, and I don't think it hurts any one of them.
Again, I have no idea how idea how Mendes' theatrical background plays into RR.
JE: I don't think it is necessarily "bad" -- unless, say, the actors are inappropriately playing to the balcony when the camera is only a few feet away. Theater and film are forms with their own demands. Early talkies are some of the stagiest movies because the cameras (which had to be encased in soundproof boxes to keep their whirring from being picked up by the microphones) were immobilized. The freedom of movement and placement the silent cinema was upstaged, if you will, by dialog -- sound technology imposing limitations on photographic technology. But some of my favorite films are overtly "theatrical" in some sense. Eric Rohmer's "Perceval" and Alain Cavalier's "Thérèse," for example, are no less cinematic for being shot on stylized stage sets. They're not just "filmed plays." The films have been envisioned using certain theatrical elements. (Another of my favorite films is "Animal Crackers" which is probably as close as you're going to get to a cinematic recording of a '20s Broadway stage production. Is it a great piece of filmmaking? No way. But it's something wonderful for other reasons.)
I thought the acting ~ great.
The movie content ~ awful.
Whatever happened to censorship?
We were offended by the cursing in the film.
I just think it could have been cleaned up.
Actually, I don't recommend the film. It is just awful.
I thought the film was good, not great. It had redemptive qualities, but the themes of it were just beaten and beaten into our heads. Like Ty Burr said, "this film is not told, it's Told".
It's a difficult, if not impossible task for a film that was adapted from a book to not be reductive in some ways. Which is obviously the difference between the two mediums. Is John Huston's adaptation of James Joyce's "The Dead" reductive? Probably. But does that take anything away from the film or the short story? I don't think so. The short story is generally regarded as one of the finest in the language, and the film is a faithful adaptation, but not regarded as highly. It's difficult to put on screen what Joyce was trying to convey but I think Huston did as good a job as anyone could have and that the film is great on its own apart from the story.
The argument isn't that good films can't come from good books, but rather that this specific adaptation doesn't hold up well against the original. I can't disagree with that. But I'd also add that there are things to be taken from the film. Burr also said something like "it's unfair to call Revolutionary Road, American Beauty without the laughs, but that's basically what it is". I agree with that. The movie is too serious and it takes itself too seriously.
The themes of wanting something different and feeling trapped, everyone should be able to relate to. April seemed like the type of person that always thinks the grass is greener. That moving to Paris will make her better, the relationship better, life worth living. But the reality is that people like that will never be satisfied, they'll always feel like where ever they are isn't good enough and they always need a change. People that are rarely comfortable with themselves or where they are in life. Paris wouldn't have fixed anything, it only would have put the real issue to the back burner for a while and make things easier temporarily because she, and they, wouldn't be thinking about their current situation.
I also think the way it dealt with the issue of realizing that you're not as special as you previously thought and your need to accept your lot in life was done well. We all think we're unique and that when we get older our dreams may come true. As we get older we slowly realize that our dreams probably won't come true. And for most people they come to this realization slowly so the effects of it don't hit as hard. But for some people they realize it all at once and it hits them so hard it can make them depressed or irrational.
Mendes does have a unique directing style that comes forth in all his films. I've always enjoyed American Beauty and therefore looked forward to RR for that reason. American Beauty always reminds that it's never too late to start living life. That life is what you make it, and that if you don't stop and look around once in a while you might miss it. (or whatever other cliche applies) Every time I watch American Beauty I'm thankful for what I have and it practically motivates me to not give up on my dreams. It forces me to think about my place in the world and what I've done so far with my life and what I want to do. It inspires me to want to do better and not take life for granted. And isn't that one of the reasons we go to the movies? To be entertained, and also to think about ourselves in a different way, look at the world in a new light, and possibly even be inspired to action? I think so. "The unexamined life is not worth living".
JE: You bring up so many ideas worth considering! Personally, I felt bludgeoned by "American Beauty" -- AND by "Revolutionary Road," except I'm not really sure what the makers of the latter film were trying to put across. Whatever it was, the impeccable design of the film made me feel they were hammering it home.
Funny, I thought of "The Dead," too -- in part because I think it's such a great literary adaptation, but also because Yates' early work (including "RR") was often compared to Joyce's "Dubliners" stories and "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." But there are so few points of comparison when you think about the film adaptations: one's from a short story, the other a novel; one uses the author's prose in voiceover narration, the other doesn't... There's even the matter of how the writer or filmmaker establish tense (both films are period pieces now, and written in the past tense, but...). Yates' omniscient third-person voice darts in and out of the characters' thoughts, spinning their words and actions, and providing the author's own commentary on them at the same time. That's an essential dimension I think is missing from the movie of "RR." I used the word "reductive" but, as you say, that term may be necessary, but it isn't sufficient to describe an adaptation all by itself. That's why I used that example about the past-tense of the book's ending vs. the movie's, and expressed the view that the movie "reduced aspects of the novel without finding significant ways of enhancing it in other dimensions (direction, performance)."
I admire Ty Burr's writing, and I know exactly what he means by "Told" vs. "told." (He made some very similar observations about "The Dark Knight.") In this biography of Yates that I'm reading there's a great line from a friend of his: "Dick generally expressed bewilderment at finding himself in a particular place and time." I think that relates to what you're saying about the Wheelers, and to Yates' understanding of them.
Finally, I have to include something Werner Herzog said to me that complements your final quotation -- although at the time Herzog probably meant it as a refutation: "A room illuminated to its farthest corner is uninhabitable." Put the unexamined life in the uninhabitable room (or the examined life in the comfortably habitable room) and you see what Yates was doing in his book...
What I think the makers of Revolutionary Road were trying to put across is that marriage can be very difficult,(obviously), that most people at some point come to the realization that they have to settle, as opposed to continuing to reach for their dreams, that it's difficult if not impossible for some people to ever find happiness in this world, that the house in the suburbs with the white picket fence and two kids does not equal happiness, and that appearances can be far from reality.
Those are all good messages and are conveyed to varying degrees. Some are used to bludgeon us and others are more subtle. I think the film succeeds and getting most of these messages across, but overall it's not a great film because of how the messages are conveyed. You rarely have to guess what a character is thinking or why a characters reacts the way they do. I suppose some of that is the fact that it is based on a novel and the characters reflect. To Kill a Mockingbird is similar in how the story was told better on the page than on the screen.
I mentioned "The Dead" to say that it could be characterized as reductive, but also a great film in its own right. Even though it could be categorized as reductive it doesn't mean it isn't also a great piece of art.
For me one of the major messages of American Beauty is also one of the major messages of Ikiru and Wild Strawberries, and that is not to take life for granted, carpe diem, it's never too late to accomplish a goal or start living better and it's a good thing to evaluate your place in the world along the way. The unexamined life quote is from Socrates and is one of the founding themes of western thought. American Beauty, Ikiru and Wild Strawberries all stress our mortality. They each remind us that life waits for no one, and that the responsibility is on us to make the best out of our time here. My favorite stories are ones that I can relate to, ones that force me reevaluate my self and my mortality. Those 3 films really get the point across to me without being redundant or hammering the point home.
This is way late in the game. In fact, the game is probably been over for ages on this one.
I just got back from a screening of RR a couple hours ago and wanted to weigh in a little.
First, I think the notion that the dress rehearsal should have been included in the film is a good one. It would have helped us to understand the more exact nature of April's personality. If would could have really seen someone who yearned for artistry, but unable to attain it for herself, the idea of her putting her dreams into an average man would have been more pronounced.
I felt that the performances were all around fantastic, but sensed something that bothers me in some films. It seemed like every character (with the exception of Maureen, Franks secretary fling, and their neighbor, April's infidelity experiment) existed for the sole purpose of casting some type of judgement on the Wheelers. I understand that to an extent, judgement is the point. But, no matter, these characters made the movie seem suffocating. Every single character is only interested in the ISSUE of the Wheelers lifestyle choices. In this way I felt as if I were watching a contemporary version of "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" that substituted the ISSUE of racism with the ISSUE of suburban dread.
None of that is to say that I didn't enjoy large sections of this movie.
And now a couple of questions.
The film put the Wheelers children at the outer edges of the story. I'm not even sure if Mendes gives us one good clean look at either of them. Is the book so dismissive of them? It seems rather far fetched to think that these children wouldn't be caught in the crossfire, or used as weapons more.
Did the book feature any significant characters that the movie excised? Characters that might have rounded the story out. The film made me think that Howard Givings might have been interesting if we'd had the chance to know him a bit more.
I think that it is true that the film perhaps sends the message that the Wheelers are special in some way. The play is poorly received at the beginning, but we do not have to suffer through it, and so we don't know whether it's April who's awful, or the play. (In Citizen Kane, we watched miss Susan Alexander's flop and Kane's manic determination to make her into something else.) And they are so much better looking than everyone else.
In a lot of ways, I kept thinking of "Mad Men" during the film, and particularly Betty Draper's plight; but the Drapers really are "exceptional" in that they are attractive, he very good at his job, she the perfect hostess and a former model who probably could have continued with it, etc., whereas the Wheelers are not.