Mid-century marriage meltdown

The talented English stage director Sam Mendes has made another movie that focuses, like his earlier American Beauty, on Stateside suburban discontent. This time his source is Richard Yates' acclaimed 1961 novel of the same name, whose action takes place in 1955. The movie reunites Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet (now Mendes' wife), for the first time since Titanic, which turned both of them into big stars. All of which makes this a movie well worth seeing, and DiCaprio and Winslet, seasoned and proven now, give intense, balls-out performances, as do several in the supporting cast, especially the edgy character actor Michael Shannon. It doesn't all quite work as a movie. Despite performances that are a knockout, the movie feels perfect, yet empty. But the novel is a stunner and even delivered in this skeletal, overly theatrical form leaves you with plenty to think about.

Revolutionary Road is a passionate indictment of the roles of men and women in mid-century America and the conformism and lack of imagination imposed by the prevailing institutions. Familiar topics perhaps, but Yates' treatment of them is a seminal one. This will show you where Women's Lib came from. A memorable if artificial shot of an army of men marching down into Grand Central to work in Manhattan, all of them in hats, underlines the prevalent sense that middle class white men were as imprisoned as their spouses in their gray flannel suits, their air conditioned nightmare, their other-directed conformity from which the only escapes were the liquid lunch of tee many martoonies, the quick rolls in the hay with sad little secretaries. The movie is good at capturing the outward shell, but not very successful at penetrating within. The Fifties are dangerous ground for younger filmmakers, who have trouble seeing beyond the shiny cars and jaunty jazz.

Another, perhaps more insidious, defense was irony and detachment. Frank Wheeler (Leonardo DiCaprio) seeks refuge there, while dabbling in martinis and secretaries too. He pretends to disdain his copy-writing job with a business machine company. For this same company his father worked for decades, unnoticed by executives, as a New Jersey sales representative. Frank, despite his disdain, which implies he envisions still better for himself, is on the way to a materially better life than his Willy Loman father. At thirty he drives a Buick, has this decent job, and lives with his pretty blond wife and their two young kids in a pretty house in Connecticut with lots of lawn. Their neighbor, Mrs. Helen Givings (Kathy Bates), the real estate agent who sold them the house, thinks them a lovely couple. When April (Winslet) was dating Frank, she thought him the most interesting, different, adventurous man she'd ever met. They think of themselves as detached from their surroundings: intelligent, creative. He has spoken of living in Paris. She fancies herself as an actress.

But nothing works, because April and Frank are only pretending to be better than their surroundings and are both quite ordinary. The couple comes on scene with a major row after April has starred in an amateur play production that is a flop. In the novel, the performance of the play, and April's evident pain as it disintegrates around her, are described in excruciating detail, but the movie skips all that and cuts to the drive home. What is surprising is how mean and accusatory Frank is. He originally thought of nice and comforting things to say to April about the play, but that's all in the book, not the movie.

April cooks up the plan of moving to Paris. They will sell the house and the car. She has heard secretaries for international organizations get high salaries in Paris. She'll work to support them (presumably with a nanny for the kids) while Frank discovers himself. Frank very reluctantly gives in, and they go ahead with plans to move. April reassures the children they'll survive with fewer toys and new friends. The Givings bring their son John (Shannon), who's been in a mental institution, and while the Paris idea shocks his parents, he congratulates Frank and April on their decision to escape from the boredom of middle-class America. Then something happens, and it all falls apart. For one thing, a memo Frank writes as a lark gets him recognition from the top management and the offer of a promotion that's too exciting to resist. The verbal fights between April and Frank, fueled by endless drinks and cigarettes, get more and more bitter, until finally there is silence, in a chilling nice breakfast when April sees Frank off to work before tragedy strikes.

Frank is not an attractive person. He has neither talent nor character, and takes unconvincing refuge in being a smart-ass. He's a rotter, condescending toward his wife, a liar, a man too full of himself to possess self-awareness. DiCaprio embraces and embodies all that. The role of April is harder because she's repressed, hiding. Her earlier enthusiasm for Frank as the most interesting person she's met becomes pathetic when it's revealed to have been so mistaken. Ultimately the movie has trouble working as a movie because both its main characters are hollow shells. It would take a lot of prose (which is found in Yates' novel) to fill in substance around these shells.

The screenplay captures the main movements of the novel. But the exquisite cinematic detail of Roger Deakins' photography, the precisely correct-to-period drapes, rugs, couches, suits, hats, and so forth, down to the overly-interesting artworks on the Wheeler walls, only distract from the intense interactions. Must quite so many cigarettes be lit, cocktail glasses of gin quaffed? The movie's devastating scenes from a marriage would work better as a play with simple sets, without sprinklers and lawns and Buicks and Grand Central. Sam Mendes, as a stage director, may have miscalculated in seeing the screenplay as a series of intense scenes of dialogue and not perceiving how the movie-work surrounding these scenes of dialogue would undermine them. The cocktail glasses and period furniture don't make up for the loss of psychological analysis.

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RICHARD YATES' NOVEL

In his astute Variety review, Todd McCarthy gives the movie its due while pointing out how it "also offers a near-perfect case study of the ways in which film is incapable of capturing certain crucial literary qualities."

The "crucial literary qualities" of this gem of a novel that Todd McCarthy mentions, without detailing them very much, would primarily be the deeper insight into Frank and April, not to mention Shep Campbell, the neighbor madly in love with April, that the reader acquires through a steady accumulation of descriptive passages detailing their inner thoughts; as well as simply a lot more dialogue than in the film, which greatly expands our picture of how Yates' two main characters interact and our sense of the sort of social trap they have fallen into. Revolutionary Road (the novel) is chiefly from Frank's point of view, though it switches to others at certain crucial moments, briefly, such as when April is preparing her fateful self-treatment.

Shep Campbell has a far more interesting, detailed, and complex back-story than might appear from the movie. Frank went to Columbia and talks about Eliot, Freud, and Kraft-Ebing. Frank and April are both more educated and smarter than the film adaptation makes clear. April is also more unhappy; her past is sadder and more lonely than the movie shows, so her desperation and need are clearer. There is more about Shep and Milly and how they confront the April's tragedy; there is also more about what happens between the Givings and their son after his last and most confrontational and disturbing visit to the Wheelers'.

The more detailed scenes between Frank and April are less shrill than in the film, even though it's evident they have had some major fights in the past, besides the cruel words they exchange during the time frame of the novel. There is a lot of discussion of the issue of abortion between April and Frank in the novel. He even acts as if wanting to abort means April is mentally ill; he mounts an intensive, full-time, month-long campaign to disuade April from this idea and at the end of this time, he is convinced he has won.

The secretary Frank sleeps with isn't dumpy-looking, though she is naive and needy. Frank resumes the affair after he thinks April has agreed to have the baby and the Paris project is off.

In a revealing and arguably crucial inner monologue April reveals toward the end of the novel that "you're the most interesting man I've ever met" was just a lie she told Frank because he wanted to hear it--or at least that's how she sees things; they both have grown into telling lies to each other and themselves and their marriage was a mistake and then a sham, from the first, in her view.

It may not be clear in the movie that April's abortion attempt is essentially suicidal, that she tries it at a time when it is definitely no longer safe, weeks later than the deadline she had determined was possible. So it is not just a great risk and gamble, as implied in the film, but a final, desperate move.

Revolutionary Road got a National Book Award nomination for its year, but 1961 was a year that included Joseph Heller's Catch 22 and J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey, Walker Percy's The Moviegoer and Bernard Malamud's A New Life, and William Burroughs' The Soft Machine, not to mention from farther afield, V.S. Naipaul's masterful A House for Mr. Biswas and Richard Hughes' The Fox in the Attic. Revolutionary Road got high praise, but The Moviegoer won the National Book Award. A tough year.

In his Introduction to the new Everyman's edition of the novel (Everyman's Library No. 317, 2009) (along with The Easter Parade and Yates' story collection Eleven Kinds of Loneliness), Richard Price writes:

...Yates...was the poet laureate of the Age of Anxiety, a master purveyor of the crushed suburban life, of the great con known as the American Promise. He was a tender connoisseur of the verbal seedlings implanted, say, in a child's visit to a father's place of work; or in the bedroom, or the bar car; at the dining table, or the two-couple cocktail party; those genteel, mostly oblivious verbal cuts and pernicious grafts that will metastasize into a hushed, lifelong dying.

Yates country lies slightly to the south of Cheever, to the west of O'Hara, east of Carver, and north of Tobias Wolff and Richard Ford. Over the last century there have been many riders on that particular literary range but what sets Yates apart, the true marvel of his legacy, is the very writing itself. His deft and miraculously weightless prose was Shaker-simple, a levitation act of declarative sentences, near-neutral observations and unremarkable utterances, as if the author were as powerless as the reader in controlling the destinies of his characters -- the slow-motion train wreck of the lives to come, the soul-killing self-realizations that will invariably be their lot. In part, the beauty and the genius of his voice lies in how its gently inexorable tone so eerily mirrors the muffled helplessness of the characters themselves."

There's a lot of context here that barely if at all makes it into the film. This also reminds me, apart from the question of the brilliance of the prose, which no film can easily hope to capture, of how Frank Wheeler is last seen in the book. In the movie, we glimse him in a park lovingly gazing on his two kids at play. In the novel, Shep Campbell describes him (to himself; he cannot tell this to his wife or the new occupants of the Wheeler house who're spending an evening with them) as "a walking, talking, smiling, lifeless man." Emasculated. And a big bore. On screen, this essential and devastating transformation has been submerged into a sentimental cameo.

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-For a discussion of the novelist's whole oeuvre, see "The Lost World of Richard Yates: How the great writer of the Age of Anxiety disappeared from print," by Stewart O’Nan (Boston Review). Janet Kay Blaylock discusses the novel on the website Suite 101. Her piece is called "Suburban Dissolution: Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road."*

-You will find a typically astute description of the man and the novel in James Wood's 2008 New Yorker piece occasioned by the publication of the Everyman edition, "Like Men Betrayed: Revisiting Richard Yates's 'Revolutionary Road.'"

*Janet Kay Blaylock's website seems to have disappeared. (May 2021).

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.