Sam Mendes (2008)
Leonardo DiCaprio is more and more intriguing to watch: with each performance, the mystery deepens as to what big name directors see in him (except box office success). It’s hard to overstate how inadequate he is as Frank Wheeler, in this adaptation of Richard Yates’ famous novel of 1961 (the main action is set in 1955), and how much this inadequacy detracts from the film. The story appears to be about a hollow man; instead we’re watching a hollow actor. Frank is 30 years old (in this respect anyway, DiCaprio, who’s 34, is credible); he hates his office job selling ‘business machines’ (on the verge of becoming computers) at the same firm where his father worked for 20 years. Married and with two young children, Frank commutes to New York from a comfortable suburban home in Connecticut. He spent time in France when in the armed forces and, as his dissatisfaction with his job has increased, he’s invoked Paris as the polar opposite of the mind-numbing life in which he and his wife April see themselves as trapped. With the strains in their marriage growing, April has the idea that they sell up and move to Paris. She can get a well-paid secretarial job while Frank can read and think and work out what it is he wants to do. (That last bit is just about verbatim and it suggests that the role of Frank would be a challenge for any actor: we need to believe that Frank is so charismatic that he doesn’t need a fantasy ambition as specific even as painting or writing a great novel or political journalism or music in order to convince April that he has greatness in him.)
Leonardo DiCaprio, in order to express inner turbulence and anxiety, usually clenches his jaw and frowns; to register extreme emotion, he shouts. In this film, he has added to his repertoire: aware that he’s playing a morally weak and manipulative man, he sometimes delivers his lines with a jaunty sneer on his face and in his voice. He’s fundamentally miscast: we’re given to understand that Frank has a great way with words, that he’s such a spellbinding talker his facility is mistaken for intellectual energy and depth. Whatever else he is (not that he’s anything really, except good-looking), DiCaprio is not verbal. You never believe that his natural way of impressing is by what he says rather than using the way he looks. To say that the role of Frank needs someone like the young Kevin Spacey may seem too obvious, given the unavoidable comparisons of this film with American Beauty, but I think it does: Spacey can talk the talk in a way that makes him magnetic (and physically magnetic – in a way that his looks alone couldn’t). DiCaprio is so weak that he throws the whole film out of balance – he seems paltry beside both the other young men we see. He suggests a good deal less mental life and individuality than his friend and neighbour Shep Campbell (David Harbour) – who is secretly in love with April but meant to be unexciting in comparison with Frank’s glamour and pyrotechnical intellect. When John Givings (Michael Shannon), the mentally ill son of other neighbours, visits Frank and April, his wit and physical presence just about obliterate DiCaprio.
DiCaprio’s shortcomings also detract somewhat from Kate Winslet’s performance as April. His presence makes nonsense of at least two of her big lines: ‘I think you’re the most interesting person I’ve ever met’, which April says to Frank shortly after they’ve first met; and ‘Will you never stop talking?’ (or words to that effect), during the most cataclysmic of the couple’s several rows. As the film approaches its grim conclusion, Frank looks at April as if he can’t fathom her erratic moods; DiCaprio’s lack of facial expressiveness means this look isn’t much different from the vaguely uncomprehending one we’ve seen all the way through when Frank’s listening to April – so the impact on her husband of her increasingly unaccountable behaviour is diluted. On his thirtieth birthday, Frank seduces a girl (Maureen Grube) from the typing pool at work. It isn’t clear whether he’s done this kind of thing before – although I assumed it was a first and happening because his sense of unfulfilled potential was overpowering on this particular day. (There’s an ambiguous remark from a male work colleague late in the film, when the Wheelers’ move to Paris has been abandoned, that this news will be well received by the secretarial pool; I took this just to mean that the girls there liked the look of Frank rather than that he’d been to bed with them all.) To show us what a rotter Frank is, DiCaprio smirks his way through his patronising leave-taking of the girl he’s bedded; he then goes back home to find that April and the children have prepared a birthday celebration and his eyes fill with tears – to show what?
There are just a couple of moments when DiCaprio does something of relative interest (I think it’s the same thing in both cases, although the effect is different). At one point, Frank starts having a go at April and his tirade develops a momentum that makes you feel is a relieving way for Frank to subdue his own guilty feelings. Then, after the big argument with April, he sits sobbing in a darkened room and seems momentarily believable. What’s happening with DiCaprio here may be similar to the effective bits of Tom Cruise’s overrated performance in Magnolia – that is, working up such a head of histrionic steam that he goes beyond his limitations as a conscious performer: he gets borne along by his energy or eventually exhausts himself, so that we’re briefly watching a man out of control or at the end of his tether – instead of a bad actor.
To be fair to DiCaprio, there are problems with this film that extend beyond its leading man. The Wikipedia article on Revolutionary Road shows a copy of the book with an admiring quote from Alfred Kazin on the cover: ‘This excellent novel is a powerful commentary on the way we live now. It locates the new American tragedy squarely on the field of marriage’. The article quotes Richard Yates himself as follows:
‘I think I meant it more as an indictment of American life in the 1950s. Because during the Fifties there was a general lust for conformity all over this country, by no means only in the suburbs — a kind of blind, desperate clinging to safety and security at any price, as exemplified politically in the Eisenhower administration and the Joe McCarthy witchhunts. Anyway, a great many Americans were deeply disturbed by all that — felt it to be an outright betrayal of our best and bravest revolutionary spirit — and that was the spirit I tried to embody in the character of April Wheeler. I meant the title to suggest that the revolutionary road of 1776 had come to something very much like a dead end in the Fifties.’
The film begins with the first meeting of Frank and April at a party, when she tells him she wants to be an actress. In the next scene – the present, several years into their marriage – we see her as the leading lady in a local amateur drama group, in what’s clearly a duff production. Frank hears someone in the audience say ‘And she was very disappointing’. Trying to console April on their drive home, he says without conviction that she was the ‘only thing in that play – I mean, you’ve trained as an actress, for God’s sake’. There’s nothing else to suggest that April is any good as an actress or that Frank’s ambition to do something or be someone remarkable is fortified by evidence that he possesses the necessary qualities. Without this evidence, the stifling conventionality of the Wheelers’ existence doesn’t seem to be impeding anything. April tells Frank that they’ve bought into the same ‘empty delusion’ as everyone else in their world; but the delusion in the Wheelers’ case seems not to be that marriage, children and material comfort will be spiritually satisfying but that they have distinctive talents that could make a difference.
The film taps a truth about many lives – the discrepancy between what you think you might achieve when you’re young and what you end up not achieving, and the dismaying realisation that you weren’t cut out to achieve what you had in mind anyway. But Justin Haythe, who adapted Yates’s book, and Sam Mendes – constrained by the cachet of the novel and the consequent assumption that they’re describing a malaise that’s intrinsic and specific to a particular society – only scratch the surface of this uncomfortable truth. Because they concentrate so much on the Wheelers and our sense of the larger world they inhabit is mostly limited to facile, sarcastic illustrations of it, the searing-critique-of-the-American-dream dimension of the material comes to seem phony. (The American dream is on a hiding to nothing if it’s to be condemned as a cheat because not all Americans are personally equipped to realise their preferred ambitions.)
In his piece on Revolutionary Road in the TLS, Leo Robson suggested that Alan Ball, the writer of American Beauty, had read – and he meant pinched from – the Yates novel. This may well be right but, because American Beauty reached the screen first, it’s hard, if you’ve not read the novel, not to see this new film as riding on its coat tails. (The territory is also not a million miles from that of Mad Men, which increases the sense of its seeming currently fashionable.) This feeling is reinforced by signs that Sam Mendes is trying to recreate the huge success of American Beauty (after two relative failures with Road to Perdition and Jarhead). There are visual compositions and details in Revolutionary Road that recall, but fail to emulate, the earlier film. For example, when the Givings come to the Wheelers for dinner, Mendes frames the table just as he did the Burnham family’s; but whereas in American Beauty the shot was held as the tensions around the table grew, Mendes cuts away so quickly that the original image is reduced to little more than a nod to the original. Thomas Newman has again written the score and delivers all that Mendes could want: the economic, insistent music has a mixture of wistfulness and urgency, with chords that suggest an evanescent opening up of possibilities. But Newman’s work is unmistakable – to the extent that it sounds here like ‘that American Beauty music’.
In American Beauty Carolyn Burnham was an estate agent and when we first see her she’s exchanging gardening tips with the neighbours. In Revolutionary Road, Helen Givings is the Wheelers’ neighbour and their estate agent; when she first comes round to see April, she brings some plants for bedding in an untidy part of the front garden. If the character of Helen has been faithfully adapted from the novel, it looks as if Alan Ball may well have been indebted to Richard Yates for elements of Carolyn. Yet here too, the effect is to make Revolutionary Road look like an inferior reworking of American Beauty: Helen Givings seems to be conceived as a rather clumsy attempt to do two familiar caricatures for the price of one, even though the halves don’t fit together convincingly – or, at least, there’s not enough to make her credible as a realtor as well as the overbearing, unhappy woman next door. This character (although she’s very well played by Kathy Bates) has a jarring flavour of non-realistic satire that’s also present in the title of the piece, echoed in the ‘Revolutionary Hill Estates’, the suburb where the Wheelers live.
In one important respect, Revolutionary Road doesn’t resemble American Beauty (or Mad Men) at all: it’s hardly ever funny. The exception to this is when Michael Shannon’s John Givings, out of mental hospital for the occasion, arrives with his parents for tea. Shannon, who delivers John’s discomfiting, deprecating barbs with sympathy and aplomb, gives the proceedings an immediate lift. John, who has a doctorate in mathematics but whose mental faculties have been addled by ECT, is still so quick-thinking that he sends the tea party out of apprehensive, polite control before his mother has even begun to prepare for his threatening to do so. The conception of the part is garish and familiar – a psychologically disturbed individual, who can no longer function in the ‘normal’ world but who perceives the alarming truth of that world and dares to proclaim that truth to those who continue to live in it. Even so, Michael Shannon is compelling. More generally, the minor characters are often more affecting than the Wheelers. It’s good to see Richard Easton again, as Howard Givings; Easton subtly suggests a man who is always in the background to his wife and son, partly because of his deafness, partly because of the people Helen and John have become. (It’s a pity for Easton that Mendes ends the film with the cheap joke of Howard turning his deaf aid down and off to cut out Helen’s self-righteous, hypocritical prattle.) After they’ve learned about Paris, Shep and his wife Millie (Kathryn Hahn) get ready for bed and she cries with helpless envy, and relief as Shep holds her, as if to show he’s happy staying where he is with her (even though we’ve already seen he’s not). When April is in hospital, Shep goes off to get Frank a coffee and there’s a brief shot of him privately falling to bits – in grief at what’s happening to April and horror that this may be happening because she’s recently had sex with him. There’s a genuine emotional confusion in these moments.
Frank and April argue about the two obstacles to Paris that come up – a promotion for him and her unplanned pregnancy. When they abandon the plan to change their lives, you’re left feeling that it’s the process of arguing, and what they’ve learned about themselves during that process, which has disposed of the possibility of Paris. (This has also meant that normal life can’t be resumed – so that their lives have changed.) Sam Mendes handles this part of the story skilfully. In other respects, he and Justin Haythe (and perhaps Richard Yates) skew the material in some disappointingly obvious – and counterproductive – ways in order to make their points. We see very little of the early stages of the relationship between Frank and April, with the result that we don’t get any real sense of what their life together has declined from. At work, Frank keeps company with men who look a generation older than him, so as to emphasise how stuck in a dead end job he is. Once her one night stand in the amateur dramatics group is over, April appears never to see anyone except the Givings and the Campbells, which makes her isolated in the wrong way. The Wheelers’ two children seem to be spending the night away from home whenever it suits the script’s purposes – and in case their presence provided an unhelpful suggestion that they might be making their parents’ lives worth living. Mendes is occasionally careless: when Frank and April first tell Shep and Millie of their plans to emigrate, the Campbells react to ‘We’re going to Europe – to Paris’, as if the Wheelers had said, ‘We’re going to live in Paris’. When ‘To live there’ follows, David Harbour and Kathryn Hahn, having anticipated the line, simply look as if they realise their mistake. Revolutionary Road is also too even-paced: when Frank has agreed to the Paris project, a scene of April getting travel documents arrives promptly but there’s then very little sense of the plan taking hold of them, impelling the Wheelers towards the realisation of the plan with a speed that might be enough to suppress Frank’s misgivings that his bluff is being called.
In the early stages, Kate Winslet seems unusually self-conscious and some of her line readings are overarticulated, so that the American accent she’s previously been able to absorb easily (to my English ears anyway) sounds practised. (It’s as if Winslet is thinking that this role really is the big one. It’s something of an irony that her part in The Reader – which Nicole Kidman had been going to play until she found herself pregnant – is the one for which Winslet is now expected to win an Oscar.) She has DiCaprio to play against; and the script doesn’t help either of them in that Frank and April never have a conversation that suggests they’re well educated and culturally ambitious, let alone questing for meaning in their lives. (There’s also a minor irritation that the Wheelers, in conversation together, keep calling each other Frank and April – having to remind themselves who they are, like television presenters conversing with each other.) But Winslet becomes gradually more impressive. Even without the words to convince us, she suggests a bright, reflective woman. She’s good at small details that make April real – like enthusiastically helping herself to snacks when April and Frank go round to the Campbells. She’s eloquent in the helpless movement of her arms as she stands beside their car in the (crudely staged) shouting match with Frank as they return from the ill-fated play. Once Paris is called off, Winslet’s performance really takes off. You can see that April has moved beyond the world she has inhabited; you can’t read where that’s taken her. On the morning of the day that is the climax to Revolutionary Road, Winslet’s emotional transitions are really startling. You intuit that April has it in mind to commit suicide. When we see that she’s decided to self-abort her pregnancy, Winslet makes you believe that April is no longer sure whether this operation – regardless of its success or failure – is any different from suicide. She makes you respond to what happens as April’s personal tragedy – in a way that gets the better of the story’s unpleasantly calculated use of abortion as both reality and metaphor.
7 February 2009
