A disintegrating marriage is the focus of this quietly shattering film, writes Michael Dwyer
James Cameron's Titanictook its own sweet time in separating the first-class passenger played by Kate Winslet from her insufferable fiance and throwing her into the arms of a bohemian artist in steerage, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. In the opening scene of Revolutionary Road, it's a case of love at first sight when the characters played by Winslet and DiCaprio meet at a party in the late 1940s. The rest of the movie then closely observes the disintegration of their relationship.
After the prologue, the narrative moves forward to 1955 when Frank and April Wheeler are a married couple living with their two children in a comfortable home on Revolutionary Road in suburban Connecticut. An aspirant actress, April is appearing in a tepidly received amateur production, after which she and Frank have a blazing row. Just as her acting dreams are dashed, he is bored with his undemanding office job in Manhattan.
April and Frank are pushing 30 and deeply disappointed with not having realised their youthful ideals and their vain ambition to lead the better life they feel they deserve. Determined not to fall into what they perceive as their suburban neighbours’ rut of daily existence, the Wheelers talk about its “hopeless emptiness”.
Frank, who served in France during the war, remarks how “people are alive there, not like here”. His disillusionment is not just professional but has turned personal, and on his birthday he drunkenly allows himself the present of an afternoon sexual tryst with a secretary from his office.
On a superficial level, Revolutionary Roadrecalls the cynical picture of suburbia drawn in the Oscar-winning American Beauty, which marked the feature film debut of Sam Mendes, already established as a gifted theatre director. The new movie, Mendes's fourth, is so merciless in its dissection of a crumbling marriage that it more closely recalls Edward Albee's withering view of marital bitterness between an older New England couple in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
Coincidentally, that play was first staged on Broadway in 1962, the year after the Richard Yates novel of Revolutionary Roadwas published. In an interview with literary journal Ploughsharesshortly before he died in 1992, Yates regretted that his book has been interpreted as anti-suburban. He said it was meant as an indictment of "a general lust for conformity all over this country".
The film effectively captures that consequence of the so-called “age of anxiety” in postwar America. Significantly, the only character who understands the anomie of the Wheelers, and who sees through their self-delusion, is a self-described certified lunatic, played with such presence by Michael Shannon in a couple of telling scenes that he was nominated for an Oscar last week.
Screenwriter Justin Haythe, a Booker Prize-nominated novelist in his own right, has avowed his respect for the Yates novel, and has maintained much of its dialogue in his adaptation. There is a sting to the lines exchanged by the Wheelers as they are drawn further apart from each other.
This emotionally charged movie is equally expressive in its silences. Winslet’s astutely internalised portrayal of April subtly catches the shifts in her personality as she loses her natural confidence and confronts the erosion of love in her marriage. As Frank, DiCaprio rarely if ever has been more impressive, and never more so than in one particularly strong scene that is brief and where he does not speak a word. Its impact is devastating.
