A very fine effort that still feels a little fussy and lifeless
Written: Feb 10 '09 (Updated Feb 10 '09)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Michael Shannon's Oscar-nominated performance. Winslet.
Cons: It all feels too carefully crafted to actually crackle with life.
The Bottom Line: Worth seeing for Winslet & DiCaprio's solid work, Shannon's excellent little performance and the careful art direction and costuming.
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| rmurray847's Full Review: Revolutionary Road |
Hollywood seems to like to explore the idea that American suburbia is a cultural, spiritual, moral and BORING wasteland. How many times have we seen this shot: A camera on a crane is overlooking a typical street in a typical, cookie-cutter subdivision…when all the cars full of all the people leaving for work back out of all the garages at the same moment…and they’re all the same make & color of car? Ha ha! That was funny the first dozen times I saw it. It’s even a big part of the opening credits for WEEDS. And in more “serious” movies, denizens of suburbia are all burnt-out middle management types, with bored wives who no longer love or lust for their spouses, and they’ve all got kids who are spoiled brats, firestarters, druggies or kids trying to GET AWAY from all the BS and phoniness.
It’s a VERY tired idea, and from viewing the trailers for REVOLUTIONARY ROAD, it sure looked like Sam Mendes was going to travel that road again…a road recently covered by the excellent MAD MEN. It looked like Mendes’ own AMERICAN BEAUTY, but without a sense of humor and set in the ‘50s. But my wife and I finally dragged ourselves anyway, because Kate Winslet is too good to miss.
In some ways, the film DOES imply that the sameness of suburbia and the drudgery of taking a train “into the city” for work kills the soul and deadens the creative spark. We see familiar scenes of New York City middle-managers trudging from the train station, all with identical suits, ties & briefcases. They all smoke. They all drink. They all cheat on their wives. They all look utterly miserable and bored…hopeless.
I happen to know that folks CAN live in suburbia, and commute a great distance AND be happy. I know that people who live IN a bustling, alive, creative city can be miserable. The old cliché “home is where the heart is” is true. I’ve endured long drives every day to work so my young family could have a house on a quite street with a decent backyard. I hated my drive…but I loved coming home. I know a lot of people like that…Hollywood just chooses to believe they can exist. In these kinds of films, the friends and neighbors living the same lifestyle are all equally unhappy.
In REVOLUTIONARY ROAD, Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio are young citydwellers who meet at a very artsy looking party, probably in the Village. They fall madly in love…but we leap forward a few years, and they’re living in suburbia (in a gorgeous house, I might add) and have a couple of young children. All their dreams of living in Paris are dead. DiCaprio goes to a job he clearly hates (and in which he’s clearly asked to actually DO very little). Winslet is the stay-at-home mom who is going just a little crazy. She’s bored with her life, but is also terrified that she and her husband are WASTING their potential and falling out of love with each other.
They have some spectacular verbal battles, doing lots of psychic damage to each other. Yet Winslet is fiercely determined to break the cycle and she concocts a crazy plan. Sell the house, quit the job, grab the savings and move to Paris. Winslet will work as a secretary and DiCaprio can spend a few months “finding out what he really wants to do.” My goodness, if that isn’t an invitation for extended navel gazing, I don’t know what is! DiCaprio agrees to the plan, and the couple begin to make plans to unravel their domestic situation.
A few complications arise, of course…some dramatic and some rather subtle. They couple reconciles, falls apart, reconciles, etc. It’s all impeccably staged and acted. It feels like a play, in fact. The overall production is lovely, but has a fussiness to it that keeps the movie from ever letting loose. It’s almost like the indictment of suburban ennui had inflicted the movie with a lackadaisical sensibility. It’s carefully put together, but has only moments of true life bursting in it…otherwise it feels too observational and not immersive.
But interestingly, it emerges not so much as an indictment of suburbia as a whole, but as almost an exploration of delusion or even mental illness. I won’t tell you WHOSE illness…although you can probably guess anyway. We all like to think we’re a little special…but most of us don’t think we’re spectacularly special. What if we did? What if we genuinely believed we were living amongst ignorant clods who couldn’t possibly understand how special and full of bright, shining greatness we are? Wouldn’t that drive us a little crazy? Wouldn’t we scheme to escape? And when escape becomes an obsession, and “real life” conspires to hold us back…just how would we respond? That’s what REVOLUTIONARY ROAD was actually about to me (not sure if that’s what Mendes wanted, but that’s what I got). The ability of some people to delude themselves constantly that life is meant to be better and more exciting for them, if only they could be somewhere else. That happiness and fulfillment are there for the taking…somewhere else. That the grass is always greener, not on the other side of the fence, but on the other side of the globe.
DiCaprio gives a fine performance (not great) as a man who has somewhat resigned himself to a life of mostly drudgery, with only occasional bursts of joy. He still looks like a kid, and middle-class gravitas does fit him easily. But his performance is sincere. Winslet, big surprise, is incandescent. She is a character who is easy to dislike, and doesn’t care. She’s selfish, vibrant, intelligent and angry. Unfortunately, sometimes her dialogue in particular (DiCaprio’s too) is SO stagey that even with her talent, she doesn’t always come across as flesh-and-blood. These characters scream EVERYTHING at each other…the writer just didn’t believe in letting anything roil under the surface…it all needed to spew out. So while the fight scenes are great in a way…they also feel like scenes, and not snippets of real lives.
There is a wild, crazy exception to all this fussiness. You’ve probably seen that Michael Shannon (excellent in BUGS, among other solid roles) was nominated for an Oscar for his role here. He plays the son of a Winslet & DiCaprio’s real estate agent. He’s a mathematician who is mostly confined to an asylum. Mom brings him round to meet the “nice young couple” for lunch, and he is immediately wise to them. He sees their unhappiness and he articulates it to them. In his first appearance, his honesty is seen as refreshing to the couple…and affirmation that they are RIGHT about their plans. Yet later, when things have ceased going so well, he spends another meal with them…eviscerating both of them as neatly as a surgeon might excise a mole. His character is difficult to believe on an academic level…yet Shannon brings an unexpected zest to his character. He’s a fussy kind of man (just as the movie is fussy), but he’s unfettered by propriety, eager to make everyone around him uncomfortable by bring out the truth. While it does feel like a device to explain to the audience what we already sort of know…Shannon is riveting nonetheless…he literally steals the show from his far better known co-stars.
It’s no surprise that REVOLUTIONARY ROAD ultimately was almost excluded from Oscar contention. It’s just a little too carefully crafted and full of itself to entirely work. Yet is it still a fascinating character study, and a movie journey worth taking. It actually does have some surprises up its sleeve.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
rmurray847
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Location: Albuquerque, NM
Reviews written: 324
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See many more reviews of mine at www.afilmcritic.com
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