Preview: Revolutionary Road
Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in Revolutionary Road
Directed by Sam Mendes from Richard Yates’ popular novel, Revolutionary Road looks into the dark constricted heart of the 1950s American Dream to find a marriage disintegrating under the weight of an invisible suburban malaise. Starring Kate Winslet and Leonard DiCaprio as the embattled couple, the film seemed poised to light up the end-of-year awards parade, but that hasn’t been happening so far.
So, what happened?
LiC contributor Sam Kressner and I take a look at what Mendes’ film got right and what it got wrong.
Craig K: Ordinarily I approach these Oscar bait-y movies that have a literary pedigree with a bit of skepticism, but I was looking forward to Revolutionary Road because of its ’50s American milieu and the cast of Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio.
For the first 30 minutes or so I was totally falling for it, but something happened along the way and it lost me. I loved the acting and the volcanic fight scenes, but the stuff in between felt flat and artificial somehow. It veered uncomfortably between brutal emotional drama and blandness that didn’t quite gel for me.
Sam K: Well, I have a confession. I’ve read most of Richard Yates’ novel. Though I loved it, I got sidetracked and couldn’t finish it in time for the film’s release, or at least, the screening I attended (don’t worry people, I’m currently finishing it up). So the ending, which I won’t dare divulge, came as a shock to me. There’s something so uncanny beneath April Wheeler’s encrusted fake-smiling that frightens in the film’s closing act. But I won’t get ahead of myself yet.
CK: Before you continue, I should point out that I haven’t read the novel at all. When it comes to adaptations, I’m a movie guy and I prefer seeing the movie before reading the book unless I can read the book so far in advance that I’m able to consider the two separately.
SK: Based on what I’d read, my expectations were relatively high going into the film. There’s nothing like 1950’s suburban ennui, so were my expectations met? Not really.
There’s one glaring difference between the novel and film. Mendes places April as the heroine of the story rather than Frank. What on paper seems like the right move actually detracts from the film’s emotional power. The film is too skewed in favor of its female protagonist, too in love with her infantile visions of life in Paris. In the novel, Frank was self-hating. Here, the audience is being asked to agree with April too often. The film is unbalanced, unequally portraying the two leads. There should be a level of ambiguity to who is right versus who is wrong. In the film, there is no question. We are guided. This miscalculation by Mendes doesn’t ruin the picture but restricts the film’s emotional weight. And when you’re working with a story like this, emotion is the crux of the narrative.
CK: That’s interesting because one of the problems I had with the film was that I kept trying to identify with Frank only to have it turn out to be April’s film. Since I hadn’t read the book, I didn’t necessarily think of it as a poor creative decision, but it threw me. I’d like to watch it again from April’s perspective to see if it goes over better. You might be right and Mendes maybe should have left the book alone. How about those performances though?
SK: The, dare I say, titanic arguments between Winslet and DiCaprio mount over the film nicely and are entirely believable. But the finest, I think, comes at the beginning of the film. April and Frank sit on the shoulder of the highway on their way back from a failed performance of The Petrified Forrest, April was cast as the lead. April exits the car. Frank follows. The fight escalates until Frank, an irascible boy trapped in the body of a confused man, nearly clobbers his wife. Instead, he punches the car. The self-masochism acts as a release and damn fine bit of drama. What makes the scene work so well is that its progression follows Richard Yates’ staging nearly word for word. When the film in general sticks to Yates’ novel, it for the most part works.
CK: It took me a little longer to warm up to Leo’s performance. As an adult, he still sometimes seems like a kid sitting at the adult table. There’s a reticence to his performances like he’s trying too hard to prove to everyone he’s grown up. I felt that way with Revolutionary Road at first, but there’s a later fight scene (I don’t want to go into too much detail for those who haven’t read the book or seen the movie) where Frank makes an admission and April expresses indifference before totally flaying him open. The naked emotion on his face shifting between pure rage and utter destruction was kind of chilling and for the first time I thought to myself “that’s the real deal.”
SK: I know what you mean when you say DiCaprio’s character takes warming up to. I believe it’s a symptom of how Mendes skews the film against his leading man. I argue that DiCaprio’s role is slightly more difficult to pull off than Winslet’s. It’s a bit easier to play the trapped female victim. Winslet is very good here but astounding in The Reader. DiCaprio’s been mostly overlooked this year, and it’s a shame because he turns in such a convincing, conflicted performance.
CK: Whatever one thinks of the film, I think Leo is getting robbed with the early awards nominations and I don’t think Kate is getting the attention she deserves either for two great performances. I liked her a bit more in The Reader, but she’s great in Revolutionary Road too. Her frustration is palpable and when she lashes out like a caged lioness, she’s still somehow kind of sympathetic even when she’s being completely cruel.
SK: Let us take a moment to rethink your description of Winslet as a caged lioness… hmmm… Okay, that was kinky. We can start again.
CK: Ha, yeah. Kate’s a distracting one. I guess it’s hard to blame Mendes for wanting to turn the movie over to her.
SK: What about the rest of the cast? What’d you think of Michael Shannon? I thought he was a bit over-the-top while David Harbour was spot on. Kathy Bates is excellent as well.
CK: David Harbour was great. One of my favorite scenes is when he walks into the living room and attempts to connect with his children who completely ignore him. I also liked Kathy Bates in a role that easily could’ve been a cartoon.
Like you, I had a little problem with Shannon, but it was the character and not the performance so much. It just seemed a little too neat and clean to have a crazy guy show up who turns out to be less delusional than anyone in the film. I appreciate the irony, but it’s too obvious. Maybe it would’ve worked better if he’d turned the performance down a notch.
SK: Yes, he should have turned down the histrionics a bit, but I blame Mendes. Maybe this is just the actor in me speaking, but if a performance is too big, a director always needs to tell his actor to pull it back; it’s one of the most important jobs a director has on set.
CK: It’s interesting you single out Mendes for your problems with Shannon. People seem to attribute every task to the director, but rarely the one they’re most responsible for: literally the directing of the actors. At least Shannon didn’t unload the way he did in Bug though (a movie I kind of liked in spite of its flaws).
SK: Did Thomas Newman’s score bug you (no Shannon pun intended)? I thought it was too bombastic.
CK: It didn’t stick out too badly for me, which is surprising because normally that kind of thing is a pet peeve – those scores that need to over-punctuate every emotional moment. I remember thinking at one point it felt kind of similar to American Beauty and Six Feet Under which was a bit of a distraction
Speaking of American Beauty, where do you stand on Sam Mendes in general? I haven’t seen AB in many years, but I liked it at the time it came out and I’ve been surprised to see some of the backlash that has cropped up against it. One of the criticisms seems to be that it takes too many easy shots at a certain slice of Americana and I wonder if that film’s detractors will have the same problem with Revolutionary Road. Did you ever find Road too simplistic or obvious?
SK: Yes, much of what’s in Reservation Road is on the nose, hard to swallow, and indeed leaves the viewer with a sour taste. On the other hand, Mendes receives a lot of flack for American Beauty, a film I believe that has been unfairly categorized as a shallow take on suburbia. I scoff at that criticism because Mendes is not responsible for the onslaught of films that copied American Beauty in style and tone. Few films in the 90s dealt so maturely with suburban resignation. I’m a pretty big fan of Mendes’ work. Road to Perdition is a beautiful and powerful film, and Jarhead’s a minor failure with an interesting premise (a war movie without war, or really a film about male juvenility?).
Compared to American Beauty, Revolutionary Road is a simpler story. Much of the drama derives from the on-set location filming in the close corridors of the house. What Mendes establishes a sense of teetering instability in the Wheeler house, an insular home of that amplifies Frank and April’s animosity. Outside is a cool calm. Inside, there is torrent of unspoken frustration. The bubble is ready to burst at any moment. It’s a quality that Mendes captures vividly.
CK: As an actor, did you make anything of the acting style of the film in general and do you have any thoughts on it? To me it felt like they were willingly leaving naturalism aside in favor of a certain stylization that would’ve felt at home in movies of the period. For the first half of the film I was reminded of a slightly more restrained version of Todd Hayne’s Far From Heaven - in a good way.
SK: There’s definitely a restrained stylized quality to the dialogue. I guess the actors were told to leave their Marlon Brando/James Dean acting guidebooks at home (which is a good thing for this text). I think the 1950s stylization of using words like “swell” seems unnatural, at first, for modern day movie stars. But the audience warms up to it after a little while. It’s funny how you pointed this out because the dialogue in the film, especially the last thirty minutes, is lifted from the book nearly verbatim. Thus, the acting isn’t stylized; it’s the script.
CK: We’ve talked a lot about the acting, but I think Roger Deakins’ beautiful cinematography deserves a special mention. I loved all the strong side lighting and there was something cold about it without it being completely sterile. It really played into the characters psychological desolation. After terrific work last year on In the Valley of Elah, The Assasination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and No Country for Old Men, it looks like Deakins has had another banner year in 2008 with Revolutionary Road, Doubt and The Reader. I actually kind of missed him with the Coens’ Burn After Reading but he’s only one man.
SK: Deakins is a wonder in Revolutionary Road. A smoky, ethereal quality is found in nearly every exterior shot. He uses diffuse lighting well, especially in that one frame where the cattle of businessmen exit the morning train on to a ramp, walking towards Grand Central Terminal. He paints a dazed atmosphere like no other cinematographer today (Jesse James anyone?). The man knows how to control and capture light with the camera’s aperture like virtually nobody else.
CK: As I start to think about it, the more distance I get on the film, the more I’m warming up to it after being initially a bit disappointed. It sounds like we’re pretty much on the same page though. We agree on the acting of the two leads and on Shannon and the cinematography. You were tripped up by the shift in focus from the book and that just might be the key to the problem I had as well, even though I didn’t read the Yates novel.
As I said before, I think I’d like to watch it again, but this time through the perspective of April. I wonder if it will work more smoothly for me that way.
Do you have any concluding thoughts?
SK: Revolutionary Road is a fine adaptation of a very good novel. The acting and staging of the drama are fantastic, as to be expected. However, the tragedy that befalls the novel’s characters is oddly amiss in the film. Perhaps I’m being too harsh, but when I’m unmoved by a film so reliant on its emotional levity, I can’t help but a point a finger or two.
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Revolutionary Road opens in limited release on December 26. Sam or I (or both) will have a formal review up between now and then.
Filed under: Previews
Tags: David Harbour, Kate Winslet, Kathy Bates, Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael Shannon, Revolutionary Road, Sam Mendes, Thomas Newman
What a cogent and engaging analysis, really the best I’ve read on this film. I dig the discussion format. You two have a good rapport, and there’s something warmly familiar about the old Siskel & Ebert formula here.
I wonder if being married to his lead skewed Mendes’ analytical sensibilities about the April and Frank’s respective emotional weights. That’s the first I’d heard that the film identifies more with April’s character, which does seem problematic. The book is so much told through Frank’s point of view, it’s a weird and slightly arrogant creative choice if he knew he was doing it
. I of course (you’ll learn this about me, Sam) haven’t seen the film yet, but the book shot up onto my all-time favorites list when I read it this year.
I thought Leo would be great for the role, in part because Frank Wheeler is still so boyish in many ways, uncomfortable with being The Man, and that’s the criticism I hear over and over of his adult roles, like you said, Craig.
Roger Deakins is a god. If I thought it would do anything to improve my skin, I’d have his name tattooed on my body. Man can do no wrong. Genius. I wish he could light my life.
The editor in me has to point out one Reservation Road slipped in there instead of Revolutionary, though that’s a pretty niggly detail.
I really enjoyed reading this excellent discussion and preview of the film. Thank you. :-)
Roger Deakins is a true artist.
Glad you two enjoyed the change in routine. It was nice having someone to bounce thoughts off of and hopefully we’ll do it again down the line from time to time.
I wonder JB if it wasn’t just a personal decision on Mendes’ part, but also an economic one. Perhaps he expected the biggest audience for this film to be women and he thought he’d have a bigger hit by focusing on the female character.
Pure speculation on my part.
I’m partial to Deakins because of all his work with the Coens (you may have heard I’m a bit of a fan of their’s :) but he’s one of a handful of cinematographers these days who seems to be doing envelope pushing work in really big movies.
Perhaps Jen, you can hire him to take the Bee family photo! That would be kinda awesome.
Spoilers: Yep, I would agree it asks us to treat April’s fantasy too realistically. The longer the film went on, the more and more I realized that poor Frank has a batshit wife. Sympathetically batshit, but batshit nonetheless. It also does something I dislike, which is force its characters to ignore obvious real-life compromise in the name of dramatic angst. There’s a false choice in there between the promotion and Paris, when a normal couple would see one as a long-term means to the other. The problem isn’t suburbia so much as the fact that these two people have absolutely no social skills whatsoever. Sometimes it’s not “the system” or “the culture.” Sometimes it’s you.
I would also say it’s an outdated movie. Culturally speaking, the novel was written during the ramp-up to the divorce epidemic. The film is being made on the downslope. The April Wheelers of the world, i.e. highly educated white women, are statistically the least likely people to be divorced. Now, you can feel trapped in suburbia without divorce, but I would say the two run hand-in-hand.
I’m not sure where I am on Rev Road. I really liked it walking out. I like the acting, particularly WInslet, and the screaming matches have a real zip that’s missing from the confrontations in Doubt, for instance. That’s probably attributable to their friendship offscreen. But I’ve started to ask myself the question: Is this film surprising, original, etc. in any way. I haven’t answered that question yet. When I do, I’ll have a better idea of how I feel about the film.
Very, very interesting analysis from both of you. I’m really looking forward to this film.
According to good ol’ Moviefone, this movie won’t be coming to within 200 miles of the Boston area before January 15. After that, I don’t know.
This film will be in my top ten for 2008, and as soon as I write my own review, I will come and read this; coz one thing I can’t stop doing at the moment is talking about the film.
I haven’t heard anything about screenings around here for this and it’s driving me nuts. Paramount Vantage used to be great about getting me updates and screenings very quickly…but they switched publicists on me.
KB you make some very interesting points about the film. I do agree that it’s somewhat dated, not just the divorce angle, but it feels like we’ve already probed the dark underbelly of the American Dream a few times before. The thing is, it’s a darkness that still gnaws at me…this emptiness at the core of it all.
Because it’s sylized and exaggerated, I don’t think the Wheeler’s choice is exactly a false one. They represent a feeling more than two actual people I think and compromise would tarnish the ideal.
Having said that, it’s hard to look at their problem with much sympathy even though I can totally identify with where it’s coming from.
Nick, I’m glad you loved the movie and I have to say many of the things you’ve said about it actually warmed me up to it a little as I was thinking about it afterwards.
K, I thought for sure a place like Boston would get this one on the 26th. Does that happen a lot for you with movies or is there just something screwy about RR?
I hear what you’re saying, Craig. But the country seems to be dealing with that emptiness differently. Maybe it’s time for films to start dealing with it in different ways.
It seems to me that the miserabilist school is starting to run out of intellecutal steam (maybe). Mike Leigh said he made Happy Go Lucky because he wanted to see if he could make a compelling movie about a fundamentally optimistic character. Merits of that film aside, it raises the question, could a modern director make a superb film about a successful suburban marriage?
I think you have a point which might explain why sometimes I wanted to shake the characters and yell “snap out of it!”
Just got to this now, and I say kudos to Craig and Sam k. for this insightful consideration of REVOLUTIONARY ROAD, Sam Mendes, Thomas Newman, and AMERICAN BEAUTY. I think this is a great idea Craig, to get the two of you to engage in this kind of insightful discourse from two difference perspectives/experience. Nice.
Beautiful movie, exploring the complex human relationships and emotions… Kate is amazing and so deserved her Golden Globe for best actress.
Thanks for stopping by Lenny. I have a couple of big issues with RR that keep me from loving it, but I know I’m pretty much in the minority on that score. I wholeheartedly agree that Kate was a great choice for the Globes. I liked both of her performances very much.
This was a great idea and I liked the conversation you two had on RR.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head with your reservations about the film. I found the acting overall to be good but I found DiCaprio’s character irritatingly immature, even though he’s really no less mature about the situation than Winslett is. Because Mendes’ film favors her character though, I didn’t really realize that until the film was nearly over.
And even though Michael Shannon is quite impressive with the ranting and raving, his character felt very perfunctory and unnecessary, a surrogate for the audience’s common sense essentially putting exclamation points on what we should already know. He’s practically a Greek chorus of one.
I think I equally admired the movie for its individual pieces (the acting, cinematography, dialogue, production design, even Newman’s score) but didn’t really enjoy or appreciate the whole. The last 10 minutes of the film for me felt alternately too on-the-nose and too disconnected. Where I should have felt something for the characters, I didn’t feel anything at all.
Regardless, Winslett and DiCaprio are doing some strong work here and Deakins can’t be praised enough for his wonderful camera work.
I’ve refined my thinking on this one somewhat and all my issues with the film have boiled down to Frank Wheeler and John Givings.
In Frank’s case, it’s not so much the acting by DiCaprio, it’s the character. A man’s slow decent into conformity is neither sympathetic or dramatically interesting. April remains the fighter and stays interesting, but Frank is reduced to kind of the bad guy and I think the movie suffers for it. According to Sam K, the book did a better job of telling Frank’s side of the story and was better for it, but the movie becomes all about April. I think it would’ve been stronger if both characters were sympathetic but at cross purposes.
The movie hints at some of Frank’s insecurities and normally I like subtlety, but Mendes picked a strange time to suddenly be subtle when the rest of the movie wasn’t. April pretty much directly communicated her feelings in the most blatant terms.
I’ve given this movie a lot of thought, which is a score in its favor, but I keep coming back to how it offered such promise in the first 45 minutes only to fizzle for me and turn out to be my most disappointing movie of the year.
I’m still not sure how Kate got nominated for The Reader and not this (and I say this as a guy who liked her in The Reader) but there you go.
The funny thing about Revolutionary Road is that Frank is pretty much the villain of the movie (for all intents and purposes), yet he has an interior life where April doesn’t really have one at all. She’s pining for the opportunity to express herself, feel, etc, but you don’t see her actually do much of that. Where she and Frank both have roles to play in the relationship, Frank seems to be actually expressing his emotions (and immaturity) far more noticeably than April.
What do you think? I feel like I kinda understood Frank, I just didn’t like him. I feel like I never completely got April, even though she’s repeatedly saying what she wants to do…I wasn’t sure until the last 30 minutes of the movie if I understood how she really felt.
Does that make sense?
I think Frank is kind of a chickenshit who hid behind his kids to maintain the status quo. For me the key to April was near the very beginning when she’s backstage crying after her play bombs and Frank comes back to talk to her. She looks up at him expectantly and hopefully…she knows the play stunk but you can see on her face she kind of wants to hear something different. But Frank says something lame (but truthful) and there’s a light that goes out inside of her and from then on it’s a case where she’s increasingly trapped by circumstance and increasingly desperate to get out of it.
It’s immature, but it felt very honest and real to me, particularly when you factor in the time period and realize there just weren’t a lot of opportunities for women outside of motherhood.
I think there are a lot of constraints placed on men as well, and I can make justifications for Frank’s behavior…he was being realistic after all…but I wish the movie had done a better job of emphasizing it.
Had the rest of the movie been an exercise in subtlety, I would’ve been happy to have to make up my own mind about Frank’s internal motivations, but it wasn’t. There were a number of times, and Givings was the most egregious example, but April did it a lot too….where a character would rather ham handedly blurt out the root of their feelings. Frank never really got to do that.
There’s some references to his father and there’s the lecture the big boss gives him about the promotion, but I couldn’t help feeling there was more to it than that.
April was immature to be sure, but as a dreamer she made a more engaging character though I suppose looked at objectively you could say she was a horrible mother and kind of a monster.
I see her as someone trapped in a situation she didn’t want to be in (rightly or wrongly) and with fewer and fewer options to do anything about it.
Factoring in the time period of the story, as Craig suggests, is helpful in understanding the film’s depictions of character. Frank, in particular, behaves as he does because not only were men of that era essentially forbidden to show their feelings, society endowed men with power over women. Females of that era for the most part were not acknowledged to actually have brains. They were expected to subjugate their desires and opinions to those of their men.
Since then, things have changed to a significant degree. People who aren’t familiar with the cultural realm of the 1950s may not have this insight to help them understand this film. And I guess that’s one of the film’s flaws, as a film should stand on its own.
Yeah, I’m not missing the time period or unaware of the social roles back then, I just felt that April was not well-defined by the script itself. Winslett gives a great performance, but April is a fairly simple character. I think you make a great point about her reaction to Frank’s critique of the play, but after that April retreats into this dream of a Better Life. Beyond that, I didn’t know what she was about it what she wanted. It was relative to the time period, but Mendes gives Frank far more development.
Frank is shown wrestling with some pretty complex emotions, especially when he’s alone. DiCaprio gives life to a fairly unattractive character. Frank is so uncertain and uncomfortable with himself he can’t even understand how to feel or react to situations. It goes deeper than just social roles. I think Frank is a child whose never been expected to actually be a man, so when big decisions come his way he acquieces to meet the expectations of others, then doesn’t understand how to deal with his own frustration over it.
It’s a great performance and DiCaprio deserves more praise for giving life to such a difficult character.
I agree that DiCaprio was terrific. A smarter man than me (I believe it was David Edelstein) commented on how the boyishness that sometimes mars DiCaprio’s adult performances actually worked to his benefit here because Frank IS such an immature character.
I also agree that there are reasonable explanations for DiCaprio’s behavior, but I didn’t feel like the screenplay had an interest in making him more sympathetic as it did with April (successfully or not).
Yeah, I totally agree with that assessment. April is obviously the film’s heroine.