I know: could anything be less worthy of your time than a critical defense of an already reasonably well-received Sam Mendes prestige pic?
Reviews have been mostly positive, per-screen grosses have been okay; yeah, it's not setting awards' season aflame, but that's probably fair: If you judge a film by the impact of its final act, Revolutionary Road is a dud. As it reaches the finish line, Mendes' faultless-to-a-fault direction can't help but scream "This is important, goddammit!" when a more appropriate response to the catastrophic denouement of Frank and April Wheeler's marriage is probably a (terrified) snort of (sympathetic) derision.
In conversation I've described Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road as a "comedy," which people have rightly taken issue with. (I'm glib, sue me.) It isn't a comedy, it's just so relentless in detailing its characters' hopeless self-deceptions that I couldn't help but laugh when I read it. Self-deception, comic and otherwise, is the theme of the best postwar American fiction,* and in his two novels--Revolutionary Road and The Easter Parade, the latter of which is featured today in a very good Slate essay by Yates' biographer Blake Bailey--Yates proved himself the master of its exposure. April and Frank are not tragic victims; they are fools. Fools preoccupied with fantasies of flight and escape and their own--entirely notional--superiority, so fools just like us...but still fools. And it is exactly that insight that the conclusion of Revolutionary Road (the movie) is incapable of doing justice to.
*(Don't ask me to back that up.)
Reviews have been mostly positive, per-screen grosses have been okay; yeah, it's not setting awards' season aflame, but that's probably fair: If you judge a film by the impact of its final act, Revolutionary Road is a dud. As it reaches the finish line, Mendes' faultless-to-a-fault direction can't help but scream "This is important, goddammit!" when a more appropriate response to the catastrophic denouement of Frank and April Wheeler's marriage is probably a (terrified) snort of (sympathetic) derision.
In conversation I've described Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road as a "comedy," which people have rightly taken issue with. (I'm glib, sue me.) It isn't a comedy, it's just so relentless in detailing its characters' hopeless self-deceptions that I couldn't help but laugh when I read it. Self-deception, comic and otherwise, is the theme of the best postwar American fiction,* and in his two novels--Revolutionary Road and The Easter Parade, the latter of which is featured today in a very good Slate essay by Yates' biographer Blake Bailey--Yates proved himself the master of its exposure. April and Frank are not tragic victims; they are fools. Fools preoccupied with fantasies of flight and escape and their own--entirely notional--superiority, so fools just like us...but still fools. And it is exactly that insight that the conclusion of Revolutionary Road (the movie) is incapable of doing justice to.
*(Don't ask me to back that up.)
But the rest of the movie DOES justice to that acid perception. For the
bulk of its running time I kept thinking "I haven't quite seen
this before"...a feature length treatment of such a literary theme.
Movies frequently deal with big-time delusions--see the trifecta of
Scorsese/DeNiro's Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The King of Comedy--but
day-to-day self-deception is difficult quarry for a bounded,
two-hours-or-shorter narrative, in a medium that by its nature hungers
for bigger, and less interior, game. The entire run of The Sopranos worked (far
more successfully) from this same theme, but wasn't saddled with the
imperative of adhering to Yates' trickily anti-tragic ending...or, come
to think, saddled with the imperative of really ending, at all.
People I've spoken with have treated the self-aware explicitness of the characters' dialogue like it's a fault. In saying they wished April and Frank sounded less like we ourselves do, and in comparing RR unfavorably in that regard to the specimens-under-glass stylings of Mad Men--a show which, good as it is, belongs safely to what Mark Greif calls "the genre of Now We Know Better"-- they're really expressing a preference for damaged characters they can more easily write off as fundamentally unlike them. (If you know anyone who claims to actually relate to Don Draper please introduce them to me so I can personally explain to them in detail how much more they have in common with Frank "Mr. Mediocrity" Wheeler). That Frank and April are self-aware attempted-escapees from midcentury American conformity and anomie is I think the film version's chief, and its most uncomfortable, virtue.
And don't even get me started on David Denby's lame assertion that both the movie and the book would've been improved by offering up a glimmering of feminist hope for April Wheeler; besides, that Slate article has already demolished it.
Wow, I've reached the end of my review and I can safely predict that I will inspire exactly NO ONE to go see this movie. But I guess futility is probably an appropriate note to end on!
People I've spoken with have treated the self-aware explicitness of the characters' dialogue like it's a fault. In saying they wished April and Frank sounded less like we ourselves do, and in comparing RR unfavorably in that regard to the specimens-under-glass stylings of Mad Men--a show which, good as it is, belongs safely to what Mark Greif calls "the genre of Now We Know Better"-- they're really expressing a preference for damaged characters they can more easily write off as fundamentally unlike them. (If you know anyone who claims to actually relate to Don Draper please introduce them to me so I can personally explain to them in detail how much more they have in common with Frank "Mr. Mediocrity" Wheeler). That Frank and April are self-aware attempted-escapees from midcentury American conformity and anomie is I think the film version's chief, and its most uncomfortable, virtue.
And don't even get me started on David Denby's lame assertion that both the movie and the book would've been improved by offering up a glimmering of feminist hope for April Wheeler; besides, that Slate article has already demolished it.
Wow, I've reached the end of my review and I can safely predict that I will inspire exactly NO ONE to go see this movie. But I guess futility is probably an appropriate note to end on!
Well, I was inspired to click on the Slate essay link, but only because you said it's written by Gossip Girl's "Blake Lively;" it was just a typo.
maybe this movie is a victim of timing, but if there's one thing i don't care the tiniest bit about anymore it's bored disaffected (but impeccably tasteful!) suburban married people, especially in the 50's.
zzzzzs.
Oops! Blake Bailey is the Yates biographer; Blake Lively is the Gossip Girl star and Cheever biographer.
I gotta agree with bmad. First of all, Sam Mendes's previous Extremely Important Talking Picture was basically this same movie, only with homophobic flourishes like gay nazis thrown in for texture. And "American Beauty" was so boring, startlingly unoriginal and offensive that I can't imagine wanting to go back for more.
Second of all, I know a few people who admire this novel greatly. I tried to read it and it was just so perfectly wrought in that "New Yorker" sort of way that I was immediately bored, sighing at each elegantly savage turn of the plot. The only part I found interesting was the extremely touching opening section about the play.
You're right, though, about "postwar American fiction" and self-deception. But for my money, most of the big names in that genre are too busy trying to be simultaneously smugly superior and highly and sympathetic to their banal, worthless characters. I realize the point of all these suburban angst novels was to point out how soulless and despairing life in Eisenhower's America was, but it still strikes me as a foolish endeavor. I have never once thought to myself, "You know what I could really use right now? A book about extremely boring characters!" Even when the characters do non-boring things, it's always the same non-boring things. They drink a lot of booze, take some pills, beat each other up, commit suicide, accidentally kill their children in car accidents and get abortions.
I'm told the Wheelers eventually engage in such non-boring pursuits, but in the meantime we're treated to Mr. Wheeler MOWING THE FUCKING LAWN!
I prefer my self-deception (and deception generally) in more intriguing and complicated forms, such as Patricia Highsmith's endless parade of cowardly murderers and sexy psychopaths.
My tolerance for the genre of postwar suburban angst is actually lower than I've indicated...but I consider Revolutionary Road to be a major exception. (When I read it I remember thinking "I wish I had JUST read this one, so I never would've had to wade through Updike, Cheever, et al.") And I think the condemnation of Eisenhower-era America in RR is less intriguing--and just less the point of the book--than the pathetic circularity of its characters attempts to escape it.
Read The Easter Parade. In no way is it a conventional suburban angst novel. It's about REALLY miserable people, who are just miserable because they are miserable. FUN!