Passion versus propriety

Revolutionary Road tackles the demise of youthful optimism

Both depressing and tantalizing
Image supplied by: photo courtesy of rottentomatoes.com
Both depressing and tantalizing

The waltz of the suburbs—house-car-job, kids-cash-death—verges unwaveringly on a eulogy to lives barely-lived. The apathetic pace is a death knell for all who resign themselves to living there.

At least that’s the tune Revolutionary Road’s couple, the Wheelers are hum-drumming. Frank and April (Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet) are a young couple with dreams. Then they moved to Connecticut, squeezed out a couple of bambinos and resigned themselves to living the modern-day tragedy played out on commuter trains and behind the picket fences of North America.

But April has had enough. She has had enough violent silence, enough crippling mediocrity, enough excuses for why she doesn’t deserve happiness. So she revives an old dream: to pack her bags and trot off to Paris, for good.

Frank, on the other hand, has his doubts about living out this fantasy. Mediocrity, while no great shakes, is rather comfortable. It seems to be just dandy for everyone and has been for generations. Chasing after dreams, so everyone says, is immature, and living in the ’burbs is not. Foregoing such childish whims is a definite mark of adulthood—right?

The plot develops into modern ennui’s classic tragic trajectory. Marital dissatisfaction, disloyal liaisons, passive-aggression and self-abnegation abound while it becomes strikingly clear that meaningless and numbing suburban card-punching just doesn’t support life for people who aren’t willing to give up living.

Revolutionary Road dishes out food for thought on a variety of levels, with some startling moments when the viewer recognizes an uncanny likeness of him or herself in April or Frank. Anyone with a soul has had the fights—or thought about having the fights—that Frank and April spew caustically all over the screen. Fights about “me” and “you,” “dreams” and “reality” and “putting up” and “packing up” resonate with everyone, particularly when combined with the fear that one day we’ll lose the steam to have those important, self-defining fights and instead slip out into the deep-end of indifference.

It’s the invocation of this fear that’s the movie’s most striking aspect. Most people do end up with lives that are mediocre at best and abysmal at worst. It’s this anxiety and reality that the majority of us will slowly shed our dreams and lose ourselves in the safe rip-tide of nameless, faceless, worker-bees of humanity that gives this film punch.

Another notable and depressing trope throughout the movie is its use of awful sex to convey the breakdown of that idyllic life kept in the inner-jacket pockets of the populace. Neither of the movie’s two depicted sex scenes occurs in a bed, the site of domestic union; rather, sex occurs in such fleeting nooks as the front seat of a car and the kitchen counter. Both instances of intercourse are anti-climatically short-lived and have nothing to do with love, and everything to do with basic human needs that can’t be satisfied in places more like traps than homes.

By contrast, Winslet and DiCaprio have a tried and true screen chemistry that works just as well in this flick about the dissolution of human bonds as it did in That Other Movie They Were In Together about the creation of those desirous bonds. Even the indomitable Kathy Bates, who plays one Mrs. Helen Givings, swoops in—just as she did in That Other Movie—to play a busy-body neighbourhood real estate agent who is hated by her son and husband alike.

Revolutionary Road incorporates a Shakespearian Fool in the form of Mrs. Givings’ son, John (Michael Shannon), an inpatient at the local psychiatric institute. Shannon’s Oscar-nominated performance as a math genius who has had one too many electro-shock therapy treatments is killer. The character unabashedly speaks out against the idiocy and banality of suburban life as the film takes a page out of King Lear and Twelfth Night’s all-licensed fools.

Director Sam Mendes puts together some pretty bang-up shots in the cinematography department, but la pièce de résistance is undoubtedly one of the final scenes in which domestic violence takes on an utterly new meaning. The tense scene is shot in the kitchen at breakfast as April prepares Frank a special breakfast for a big day at work. The couple’s conversation is so civil you’d think they were strangers at a country club luncheon. April asks Frank to explain some inconsequential aspect of his job and she listens attentively and feigns interest in this utterly yawn-worthy subject. Despite these pleasantries, April whisks eggs and juices oranges with all the violence of a rabid wolverine and her perfect decorum drips with evidences the demise of human intimacy.

Is Revolutionary Road a depressing two hours of your life that you will undoubtedly spend wishing for some Valium? Sure it is. Would I trade those two hours for anything? Not a chance. The movie serves as a terrifying warning about what happens when passion is traded in for a complacent, skeletal, routine of a life. Mendes’s flick unequivocally rings of the Beatles lyrics: “You say you want a revolution?” Yeah well, then don’t throw in the towel, give up on Paris and move to Connecticut.

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