Revolutionary Road – A Life of Quiet Desperation
“Can you believe it? We just ended up being like everybody else?!”
John Givings: Hopeless emptiness. Now you’ve said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.
Some films relish in the aftertaste of the moments not captured in their entirety, unsettling yet no good reason to be so, poised and in-their-moment and that, yet no way outwards. Revolutionary Road is such a film.
Not that we haven’t seen suppression of emotional outburst as a result of years of ambition gone waste, or a domestic conflict providing the premise for a proof-by-contradiction narrative of a conflict being viewed as a norm as opposed to an anomaly in the larger scheme before, but this film takes us inside the head of The Wheelers, both as on a name plate and the real thing, unsurprising at most of the times, and wry and uninteresting at the rest. The ambition plays out in the irony (revolutionaries; you are what you make fun of) while the couple kowtow with least exposition of their daily promises in a sweet song, of repeat play of sorts.
Not that it does not reside in the 50’s, but the under-running emotion of weighing happiness by money, family pride by social stature, personal aspirations by professional perks is way too heartfelt and relatable to be limited in one time. Who wouldn’t have gone through a similar tryst at least once in his/her working life – the daily spring balance of priorities vs. responsibilities? Where dreams die and you pretend not to notice….
April Wheeler: Tell me the truth Frank, remember that? We used to live by it. And you know what’s so good about the truth? Everyone knows what it is however long they’ve lived without it. No one forgets the truth Frank, they just get better at lying.
In fact I would say the ‘depression’ or ‘emotional sterility’ or ‘hopeless emptiness’ is better placed in times of today – the economic downfall and all that depressing talk of us losing our jobs at the slightest pretext. The everyday proverbial sword hanging leaves no room for dreams to prosper, dreams are sent on a quiet vacation till economy blooms again. Money is saved, purchases and indulgences cut to the minimum, and all stare at an empty sky. That kind of lonely/hollow emptiness….
April Wheeler: Look at us. We’re just like everyone else. We’ve bought into the same, ridiculous delusion.
Revolutionary Road takes this emotion and paints it in love – in the everyday tussle of a never-to-be-ideal couple living in this indifferent suburbia. And that, is saying too much. The emotion weighs heavy and the film thrives to breathe under the heavy air of background-literary, historic and generational.
This remarkable feat is achieved towards the later portions, where Frank, Leonardo’s character, rethinks his takin’-off-to-Paris decision in wake of the social inquiry and economic feasibility of the same. He, who had happily resigned to the dream life of a non-earning husband sitting in his ‘bathroom pyjamas’ and wondering what is the one thing he is cut out for while his wife earns bread for their little family, considers the odds against this seeming escape and comes out more confused than ever. And that is the beauty of the film, the story, the source material, and not to miss, the enraged, towering and risky performances of Di Caprio & Winslet, they put them on test, make it burn, and come out a little less than absolutely clean.
This, while on one hand, gives credit to the writing, puts the viewer in the thinking seat on the other. You think hard which side to take – April(Kate Winslet) who built the dream in the first place, or Frank, who first concedes at the onset than recoils from accepting the weight of his decisions. And it is no surprise that the final blow is helped by the ever-trustable device of the unwanted child-in question. This lends an emotional meter to the until-now aspirational or idealistic divide.
Sam Mendes employs all his stage knowledge to give a unique flavor to the quite-staged sequences. In one heated-as-ever tussle sequence, Frank confesses his affair with the office intern (another well-worked angle – sex is a mere return to youth element) to April, and the way the exchange of dialog happens is staged expression on film at its best. April, in the very next scene, threatens she will scream, and she actually does! This scene puts the film in a mad-deranged category, much of what the ‘milk shake’ did to Paul Thomas Anderson’s seminal There will be Blood.
Michael Shannon as John Givings is obviously the Paul Dano of this film, may be a notch higher, for this is a given mentally unsettled character, a dream liberty in cinema, where an actor with his/her calibre can do wonders, and Shannon doesn’t miss a chance no surprise. Shannon’s unexplained loud rhetoric is an ironic explanation of Frank’s confused take on life, enough said.
John Givings: You a lawyer, Frank?
Frank Wheeler: No, I’m not.
John Givings: I could use a lawyer…
Mr. Howard Givings: John, let’s not get started again about the lawyer.
John Givings: Pop, couldn’t you just sit there and eat your wonderful egg salad, and quit horning in?
[Returns his attention to Frank]
John Givings: See, I’ve got a good many questions to ask and I’m willing to pay for the answers… Now, I don’t need to be told that a man who goes after his mother with a coffee table is putting himself in a weak position, legally; that’s obvious.
Mrs. Helen Givings: John, come and have a look out this fabulous picture window.
[She walks to the window]
John Givings: If he hits her with it and kills her, that’s a criminal case…
Mrs. Helen Givings: Oh, look, the sun’s coming out!
John Givings: If all he does is break the coffee table and give her a certain amount of aggravation and she decides to go to court over it, that’s a civil case…
Mrs. Helen Givings: Maybe we’ll see a rainbow! John, come have a look…
John Givings: Ma, how about doing everybody a favor? How about shutting up?
In all ‘neighbourhood films’(a research project that I have incidentally been working for an year now, mainly bordering on how films capture the ever-illusive American Dream through the possible devices of a neighbourhood setting, a collective conformity that clouds the micro-angst and makes you forget the small sacrifices for the larger and more apparent social truth), one significant shot is of the street, the fences, the angle at which it is shown, the way it either establishes loneliness of the central characters or the visibly disturbing indifference of the supporting cast(more of a foil). And in Revolutionary Road, Mendes has quite an expert eye on exploiting this device, he takes you to the streets through open yet claustrophobic glass-windows(the much awaited ‘Revolutionary Road’ is mentioned here in what-fortunately-remains the climactic line of the film), he gives you a picture perfect wide-angle frame of the cross-roads yet subtly punches in the sweet irony of it all, much like any good ‘neighbourhood film’ would do.
I couldn’t help drawing parallels to Walk The Line, Pursuit of Happyness, and may be even Sweeney Todd(the dream), and American Psycho(the office lunch).
Certainly a towering work from Sam Mendes. Now the cinema he has amassed under his name is so diverse, one can hardly pick choices. American Beauty, Road to Perdition, Jarhead and now this, are all equally important and significant in their own time and space, but I am a little biased towards Revolutionary Road and would certainly rate it higher than the more approachable American Beauty, at least as far as suburban angst is concerned. You might want to add ‘minus the satire’ to the analysis/comparison/ deduction.
I would certainly place Revolutionary Road as the ‘No country..’ of the year.
April Wheeler: Don’t you see? That’s the whole idea! You’ll be able to do what you should have been allowed to do seven years ago, you’ll have the time. For the first time in your life, you’ll have the time to find out what it is you actually want to do. And when you figure it out, you’ll have the time and the freedom, to start doing.
Frank Wheeler: This doesn’t seem very realistic.
April Wheeler: No, Frank. This is what’s unrealistic. It’s unrealistic for a man with a fine mind to go on working year after year at a job he can’t stand. Coming home to a place he can’t stand, to a wife who’s equally unable to stand the same things. And you know what the worst part of it is? Our whole existence here is based on this great premise that we’re special. They we’re superior to the whole thing. But we’re not. We’re just like everyone else! We bought into the same, ridiculous delusion. That we have to resign from life and settle down the moment we have children. And we’ve been punishing each other for it.
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
“I am a little biased towards Revolutionary Road and would certainly rate it higher than the more approachable American Beauty”
Really?
Seriously?
Tushar – I liked the film in the overall sense but I have a problem with it. Hvaing read the original by Yates, I get a feeling that Mendes takes away from the eloquence of the book and its characters and replaces it with his view of American suburbia, its staidness, its inanity and finally imbues the film with a tartness.
@Mainak, ya dude. so totally seriously. It’s easier to direct AM with such a script and actors.
@Subrat, yes that is one observation across all the reviews I read, but I kinda liked the ‘play around’, may be because I haven’t read the book.
“April Wheeler: Tell me the truth Frank, remember that? We used to live by it. And you know what’s so good about the truth? Everyone knows what it is however long they’ve lived without it. No one forgets the truth Frank, they just get better at lying”
Nice dialogue but as Siddharth says in RDB “aise kaun baat karta hai bey?”
A well-made film but didn’t work for me. Couldn’t connect with anything, anyone.
Nice write-up. It’s an excellent movie, liked Leo’s performance a lot in this one.
Devastating film. I was depressed for a whole day, and I mean it as a compliment.