DiCaprio and Winslet in Revolutionary Road
Titanic Co-stars Reunited in Shattering Domestic Period Drama
Dec 9, 2008
If they were looking for a property to help fans forget Titanic’s Jack and Rose, this couldn’t be a bigger port-to-stern turnabout .
Titanic Marital Problems
This time out, Leo and Kate are the dysfunctional Frank and April Wheeler. It’s the mid-1950s, and the Connecticut couple is at a crossroads in their marriage. Frank’s desk job -- at the same company where his dad worked for 20 years -- bores him to tears. Housewife April feels adrift in the marriage, and her dreams of being an actress are dashed after a dreadful amateur production.
As a couple, they feel empty, going through the motions for appearances’ sake. To neighbors and their suburban community, they are “special.” But slowly, the reality of their very ordinariness mixes with their mutual alienation. The result approaches toxicity. April thinks she’s got the solution: Let’s move to Paris!
Paris as Panacea?
She tries to convince a skeptical Frank that once in the French capital, she could easily support him and their two kids, while he finds something else to do with his life.
But what to do, exactly? That’s something no one, especially Frank, has a clue about. He’s never wanted to be an artist, or a writer, or otherwise creative type. And does April really think she can support the family on a secretary’s salary?
(Further, would Frank, a quintessential 50s man, ever really accept being supported by his wife?)
What really appeals to them is the idea of freedom Paris represents. It’s a freedom they convince themselves is unachievable in the big, bad materialistic U.S.A.
Based on Richard Yates' Novel
Based on Richard Yates’ landmark 1961 novel, Revolutionary Road spotlights American conformity and intra-marital expectations and misperceptions. The knowing adaptation by Justin Haythe, who scripted 2004’s The Clearing, retains the novel’s razor-sharp portrait of personal failure in an ostensibly successful American household.
As the cad Frank Wheeler, DiCaprio does just fine. But this really is Kate Winslet’s movie. She lurches from rage to resignation and everything in between, capturing in excruciating detail a wife’s loss of selfhood in the pre-feminist Eisenhower years. April, a strong-willed, pragmatic woman, practically disintegrates onscreen. Her face, slowly freezing into a barely controlled mask of anguish, recalls the beautiful, ambivalent women of painter Alex Katz.
It’s one of the bravest American film performances in a long time.
Directed by Sam Mendes
Winslet’s husband Sam Mendes directed with the same telling eye he showed in American Beauty. And with cinematographer Roger Deakins, he has shot the film with a pastel palette that lovingly recreates the look of 1950s melodramas but with an eye on human frailty rarely seen in actual movies of the Eisenhower era.
Among supporting players, Kathy Bates delivers her usual fine work as the real estate agent who sold the Wheelers their house and who ingratiates herself into their lives -- while never really knowing them at all.
Michael Shannon Shines
But special praise is due to Michael Shannon as Bates’ adult son, a mathematician institutionalized after an emotional breakdown. He is the one person capable of understanding the mechanics and nuances of the Wheelers’ marital disaster. And lacking the ability to measure his words, he verbally disembowels them with surgical and cruel precision. That he does it to their faces in their own dining room makes for the most electric scene in a film brimming with them.
(His mathematics background and difficulty with people suggest he may be suffering from Asperger’s Syndrome – a form of autism characterized by intellectual brilliance and unsociability. This would easily be misunderstood and undiagnosed in the mid-50s.)
If any actor deserves a supporting actor Oscar nomination by acclimation, it’s Michael Shannon.
Revolutionary Road – the double entendre title ostensibly refers to the Wheelers’ street – may be a period piece. But what it says about human relationships and self-deception is pretty timeless.
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