Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, stars of the mega-hit Titanic, reunite for Revolutionary Road. But, instead of weepy melodrama, this time round they want to be Serious with a capital S — and, boy, do they Succeed.
Based on Richard Yates’s 1961 novel, the film is set in the mid-1950s, when the American Dream had relocated from the frontier to the suburbs, to a world of consumerism and conformism. In the corners of the American Dream, however, lurked a nightmare — and that’s what the film explores.
We see newly married couple April and Frank Wheeler (Winslet and DiCaprio, obviously) house-hunting in the suburbs, with a chattering estate agent (beautifully played by Kathy Bates) telling them how this area is a little down-market, but just around the corner the perfect house awaits — This scene is like a small summation of the values that will be interrogated in the film, and the Bates character represents the kind of normalising pressure that will sharpen into a stake through the heart of the Wheelers’ marriage.
For, in a prologue, we have seen the trajectory of this marriage neatly traced. We see April and Frank meet at a party, make pretty small-talk, and — wham — we’re in the audience of a desperately bad theatrical production, apparently soon after the actual marriage. This theatrical event provokes the shattering of April’s dreams to be an actress, and within minutes we’re faced with the bitter anger and resentment that wells up between the two halves of the couple. And that’s before we’ve even seen the movie’s title.
Unfortunately, there are few surprises ahead. If the prologue takes us from the first romantic moments to the souring of love in one easy jump, the rest of the movie will play out the variations of the souring, in all their torturous highs and lows. Basically, you strongly suspect from the first few minutes of Revolutionary Road that it is all going to end in tears, and the movie then takes the next two hours to end in tears.
It is directed by Sam Mendes, who covered somewhat similar territory in American Beauty; there, however, it was done with more satirical bite, and was helped by brilliant central performances from Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Wes Bentley and Chris Cooper. It’s not that DiCaprio and Winslet are not up to the demands of the script or story in Revolutionary Road, it’s just that there isn’t that much to be up to. They deliver good performances, especially Winslet, but the cycle of emotions and confrontations the characters go through is repetitive.
This is way too much like the real-life torture of an unhappy relationship. And it’s way too much like a theatre piece in which there is much striving towards the Moment of Truth when all the suppressed pain and fury spill out in a Big Confrontation and/or a Big Speech. Tennessee Williams did a lot of this kind of thing, during the actual 1950s in fact, and Revolutionary Road is rather like Tennessee Williams with the melodrama dialled back and, apart from those Moments of Truth, contained in a series of sensitive close-ups in which the twitch of a jaw muscle or the tightness of a pair of lips are required to say an awful lot.
Mendes is very fond of an extended reaction shot, or holding the camera on the actor’s face to register the most minute flickers of half-suppressed emotion. Perhaps this would work better if we had some surprises in store as the narrative progresses, but here it all feels so relentless. The emotion is tele-graphed; the emotion explodes. It’s like a Greek tragedy in which the disaster predicted by a Sphinx in the first act then plays itself inexorably out, with only slight diversions as the characters delude themselves for a short while that things could be different, that there could be some escape from Destiny, there could be some other Dream worth aiming for. There’s even a Sphinx-like character, one on the border of nuttiness, to do some very obvious truth-telling — just in case you missed the implications of that jaw-twitch or lip-clench.
Revolutionary Road is not a bad film; it may even be a good film. It has the production values, the careful script, the meticulous direction, and the throbbing performances. It is clearly Serious; behind the frequent understatement the Themes are being announced in Capital Letters. It has already attracted attention from the annual awards bodies, and will surely be nominated for Oscars. Me, if I want to watch a really depressing movie about dreams destroyed and love gone sour, there are several by Ingmar Bergman that would do the job with less fuss.