Revolutionary Road
Directed by Sam Mendes
Richard Yates’s novel Revolutionary Road is a work in disguise. It takes the form of a domestic tragedy, but it is actually a savage satire. There really isn’t anything quite like it in the canon of modern American fiction. Indeed, it is so singular a performance that Yates, who never wrote anything one-fiftieth as good after it, may not really have understood himself what he was up to when he wrote it.
What makes Revolutionary Road so memorable is not its story of a dissatisfied young couple, the Wheelers, who hatch a disastrous escape plan from the leafy suburbs of New York where, they are certain, the life is being choked out of them. After all, there were dozens of works of popular sociology, novels, and stories written in the 1950s about the deadening conformity of upper-middle-class American life; in 1964 Betty Friedan took those same ideas, already worn into scuffed clichés, and cobbled them into The Feminine Mystique.
No, what gives Revolutionary Road its unforgettable resonance is Yates’s fundamental dismissal of the grievances of his characters. Whatever woes they have are entirely of their own making. The Wheelers are fools to believe that their lives are so horrid when they and the marriage they have contrived together are the only really horrid things in it. And they are fools to believe they are better than the people around them, a view that derives directly from those novels and works of sociology Revolutionary Road is subtly parodying in its portrait of the Wheelers.
As Adelle Waldman put it in a brilliant piece that ran on the New Republic‘s web site, “Yates isn’t seduced by his characters’ emotions, no matter how earnestly experienced; he lays bare the roiling pools of vanity and narcissism that underlie them.”
The unpleasant new film version of Revolutionary Road is both remarkably faithful to and a complete hash of the novel. Screenwriter Justin Haythe has done a splendid job of compressing the incidents and events of the novel into a two-hour script, and the work of director Sam Mendes is tasteful and careful. But they have no idea what the novel is about. They think Revolutionary Road is one of the 1950s conformity books of which it is actually a critique.
And so they take the Wheelers at face value–or rather, they take April Wheeler (Kate Winslet) at face value. In the movie, April is entirely justified in her conviction that she is being stifled in the suburbs. Her dream of escape to Paris would, Mendes and Haythe seem to think, really free her from bourgeois bondage. The only real crime on display in Revolutionary Road is that Frank Wheeler (Leonardo DiCaprio) doesn’t understand how much his wife needs to flee and what will happen to her and to him if she doesn’t get it.
This is a fatal misreading of April, one of the most interesting monsters in American fiction–a dynamically sexual, intelligent, and sharp-tongued woman whose odd indifference causes men to love her and causes her to feel no love for them or her children or much of anything. Her soullessness is apparent in the novel well before they move to the suburbs. Yates views her with pitiless eyes; the movie does little but pity her.
The flaw in the film’s conception of April is matched by Winslet’s performance, which is so shockingly bad, so completely dreadful, that she has managed to convince many sensible people she is great in it. Have you heard of “less is more”? For Winslet, there is no “less,” and “more” is only the beginning. There isn’t a moment in the course of Revolutionary Road when Winslet isn’t acting, acting, –acting, acting, acting! She pulls at cigarettes, she trembles, she expresses dissatisfaction by smoking and trembling. She yells and screams and cries. When she is quiet, it is even worse; she turns into a Stepford wife, as vacant-eyed as a zombie.
What’s odd about Winslet’s work here is that two years ago she played another dissatisfied suburban housewife in the immensely superior Little Children, and her performance in that film was spectacular. In Little Children, Winslet seemed aware that her character had summoned most of her trouble upon herself. But the mid-1950s setting of Revolutionary Road has caused this wonderful actress to play April Wheeler not as an individual but as a type, as her tribute to Friedan’s miserable housewife suffering from “the problem that has no name.” Friedan produced a caricature, and so does Winslet.
DiCaprio is technically a very fine actor, but in this, his first real effort at playing a husband and father, he is undone by his inability to imagine what a 30-year-old man of the 1950s might actually have been like. For one thing, such a man would have worked hard at eliminating any trace of the high and breathy tone of a teenager in his voice, which DiCaprio still retains. I hate to put it this way, but he has left me no choice: When, on at least two occasions in the course of the movie, DiCaprio actually weeps with rage, he cries like a girl.
Without the dual effect of Yates’s portrait of an unhappy marriage made more unhappy by excuses and fantasies generated by popular culture, Revolutionary Road is simply an off-putting portrait of marital bile generated by two uninteresting people. It wants to be raw, but is instead just a pile of gristle.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
