Saturday, November 29, 2008

Revolutionary Road

by Ari

An interesting question came to my mind once the end credits rolled for Revolutionary Road, the newest foray into suburban angst from talented director Sam Mendes. Is totally incompetent B-trash like The Happening worse than a supposedly prestigious art film that completely drops the ball on all levels, but still tries to provoke an intelligent audience with its aggressive and relentless melodramatic bullshit? I think, ultimately, a film like Revolutionary Road infuriates me far more than a laughable mistake like Shyamalan’s recent debacle.

There’s no question Sam Mendes is a formidable presence in the film community. American Beauty, while a tad overrated, is still powerful, affecting work, and Road to Perdition still remains one of the most beautifully crafted and performed period films of the decade. It’s not that a misfire or two is totally unexpected with talented filmmakers, but a complete train wreck disaster without one redeeming quality? That’s a surprise.

So if it's not already obvious, I’ll just put this out there: Revolutionary Road is the biggest disappointment of the year, an artificial, overblown mess about a destructive marriage that somehow miraculously turns gifted actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet into petulant, undisciplined theater students who have no business being in something so intimate, complex and emotionally demanding. Or, as a friend pointed out as we angrily walked to the subway, “it’s like amateurish community theater trying to do Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”. Revolutionary Road is based on the celebrated novel by Richard Yates, but surely something was lost from page to screen, as this melodramatic farce couldn’t possibly be what so many avid readers have been praising over the years. The script, adapted by Justin Haythes, is remarkable in its inability to keep a single moment subtle or internal.

You know something’s wrong if Kate Winslet is unable to make any of her lines sound good. The dialogue in Revolutionary Road is unnatural, silly, and overly expressive to the point of becoming unbearable. DiCaprio’s Frank Wheeler is a particularly strange clusterfuck of personalities. Some moments he has the screw-it-all, free-thinking charisma of a Jack Kerouac character, while in other moments he explodes into Marlon Brando’s angry, retarded cousin. Then there are moments....moments where I just had no idea what the hell he was doing given the nature of the scene.

The narrative’s poor pacing certainly never helped, but the big, splashy arguments between Frank and his wife April (Winslet) never communicate the pain, suffering and tension for the audience because it's all so over-wrought and on-the-nose. The characters aren’t particularly likable, which is fine, but they have to be believable. There’s nothing believable or authentic in this film. There’s no depth to the characters and themes because everything feels like it’s being blocked and rehearsed on some stage, not like it exists in the actual environment the film tries to recreate.

The Wheelers are struggling with the “hopeless emptiness” of suburban life, the crazy concept that happiness means a nice house with a porch and lawn, two beautiful, precocious kids and a steady job for the man and housework for the wife. Because neither of them are happy with the situation, their fantasies and insecurities eventually destroy them. Just in case you didn’t get this, a demented supporting character played by Michael Shannon restates everything in his two sequence of miserable “subtext” delivery. Before he leaves the movie he points to Winslet’s pregnant stomach and yells, “I’m just glad I’m not that kid!”. It’s supposed to be funny with a bit of oomph to it. I just thought it was funny. No oomph.