Revolutionary Road: Where Life Stands Still

“Knowing what you’ve got, knowing what you need, knowing what you can do without –- that’s inventory control." –- Frank Wheeler in Revolutionary Road.

Revolutionary Road, based on a popular 1961 novel by Richard Yates, is set in America of the mid-1950s. The period is important in a certain sense. And then again, it’s not. What gives Sam Mendes’ suburban nightmare a universal quality (far more than his earlier American Beauty) is that it sort of typifies most marriages anywhere in the world. Two people often come together with the notion that they nurse common dreams, which could become the basis of building a life together, different from scores of others. But it’s entirely impractical, nay, totally impossible for this belief to actually last a lifetime. What does happen, more often than not, is what Frank and April Wheeler play out on screen. They stop listening, hit each other where it hurts most (for, living together actually opens out all their warts and weaknesses), and foist their bitterness and misgivings about their own failures upon one another, so that even inane conversations become potentially explosive situations. But the tragedy cuts deeper because Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet make such a handsome, electrifying couple, it’s depressing to watch them tear each other to shreds in scene after scene. This isn’t the romantic reunion their Titanic fans would’ve wanted. They’re so merciless you want to beg them to stop. Although anyone who’s been married long enough should know that they just wouldn’t listen, because that’s what marriage does to the best of people. It sort of dehumanizes them by putting their individual personalities in a box and forcing them to pretend that the act of coming together wiped out much of what was distinctive about them, in an irrevocable way.

That Frank and April live in the conformist ‘50s, contextualizes their despair – he’s trapped in the same mechanical job his father had done 20 years earlier in a company that makes adding machines, she, in playing suburban housewife and mother of two when her spirit longs to be elsewhere. You can watch the film twice, as one critic suggests – from either character’s point of view. Both, unfortunately, are equally valid. Neither knows what they really want, except that the life they’re leading is as far from the one they’d envisioned when they first met at a New York party, as possible. Mendes doesn’t dwell on their romance at all, cutting straight to their pretty white house with a prim, manicured lawn on a street ironically named Revolutionary Road, which was meant to be a temporary abode, except that two children and a humdrum existence tied them all up in knots. The hope of escape comes in the form of April’s naïvely romantic suggestion that they move to Paris and start afresh. Frank doesn’t really comprehend what this means for him (she plans to get a secretarial job and leave him all the time he needs to ‘find himself’) but decides to play along simply to escape the boredom of the existing predicament that’s punctuated by a listless affair with an office secretary. When he’s explaining the idea to friends and colleagues he seems to be convincing himself, more than reassuring them that it’s a brilliant and workable solution. They, in turn, are skeptical, yet envious.

The only person who actually thinks they’re doing the right thing is their realtor’s (Kathy Bates) insane son John Givings (a brilliant Michael Shannon) who was once a mathematical genius but is now confined to an institution where he’s undergone extensive shock therapy. He is nervous and fidgety, but the only problem he really seems to be suffering from is extreme truthfulness in a time and age where propriety mattered more. As April screams in an emotionally charged moment, “No one forgets the truth. They just get better at lying.” But by the time John comes to their house on a second visit, things have changed dramatically. Frank gets a lucrative promotion and April gets pregnant in that brief rekindling of their relationship with the promise of change, so that suddenly, Paris becomes a distant dream all over again.

Justin Haythes’ screenplay reflects Frank and April’s story on those around them very effectively – particularly their equally discontented neighbours who choose to sink back into their delusional life than confront their fears. But he keeps the Wheeler kids firmly in the background, which is a mistake – children exacerbate the marital tragedy, and it’s their presence which often fuels the necessity of building the illusion of a ‘stable family’. Cinematographer Roger Deakins creates an accurate sense of the boredom of prosperity, with squaky clean, colour co-ordinated compositions and Thomas Newman’s music punctuates the tension with a false sense of calm. But it is the lead pair that lends this film its emotional edge. If DiCaprio’s boyish looks heighten the frustration of a man staring at an empty life ahead, Winslet’s slightly wrinkled brow and taut face can scarcely mask the anxiety lurking under her pleasant demeanour. Their final scene together is a study in desolation – no two people sitting so close at an ordinary breakfast table could be as far apart. At the end of a lifetime together, they’d have turned their disappointment into a sport in the fashion of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.

The tragedy of Revolutionary Road is that most people would watch it with a mild sense of detachment. At a time when the world as we know it is falling apart in the wake of financial doom, perhaps its time to look inwards, throw caution to the wind, and embark on a journey to rediscover who we really are. As John surmises, “Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.” And even more perhaps, to move on from there….

Deepa Deosthalee