Last Sunday’s matinee of Revolutionary Road was surprisingly packed, and it wasn’t just local football widows lining up to see Leonardo DiCaprio.
What did they come to see? Leo and Kate Winslet all grown up after their youthful and exuberantly tragic love-tussle aboard the Big Boat? Or another take on our renewed fascination with the 1950s – to see what a mess The Greatest Generation made of all that Post-War promise.
Whatever their curiosity, what Revolutionary Road delivers is an exquisitely measured performance by Winslet. Talk of filming Richard Yates’ excoriating postwar novel have been floating around since it was published in 1961, but it is obviously in good hands with a husband and wife team like director Sam Mendes and Winslet. The story of Frank and April Wheeler – their wide-eyed promise and tortured downfall – the film is as faithful and fascinating a portrait of Yates’s story as one could imagine.
Having a sensitive collaborator behind the camera doesn’t hurt. Yates told the story mostly from Frank’s perspective, but here Winslet is at the center, and Mendes is able to use her inner-life to capture the tragic conflict of the story. It’s reflected in Winslet’s unspoken reactions, full of vivid detail and interior life: her easy fascination with her future husband; the conflicted and seemingly forced joy when she sees her new suburban house for the first time; and the way her vibrant soul shines through when she ponders her escape to a fantasy Bohemian life in Paris. It’s not just a tale of a dream deferred, but of a spirit struggling to shine through the vapid wash of the American “good life.”
Ultimately that struggle gets projected onto April’s marriage, which implodes by degrees and then violently erupts into domestic warfare. In Yates’s novel, he earns these heightened emotions by crafting his characters with pages of probing psychological insight. And to his credit, Mendes and screenwriter Justin Haythe are able to convey some of the complexities behind the shouting and smashing of housewares. In these scenes, Mendes captures two actors (and characters) at their most raw and vulnerable, but because we’ve only known these people for a little over an hour, the emotions don’t ring quite true, and the scenes even edge toward camp.
But that’s only one – perhaps unavoidable – problem with a film that aspires to the level of tragedy that is occupied by few American stories. The 1950s milieu (production design by Kristi Zea) is not heightened into near-kitsch but, rather, serves as a neutral yet evocative backdrop for the human stories. And the supporting characters are just vivid enough to punctuate the landscape, with a particularly electric turn by Michael Shannon as a deinstitutionalized Tiresias whom the Wheelers embrace as a kindred spirit.
It’s a hard vision of America to sit through in these optimistic times, but it is a perceptive and necessary one.
