Rockin’ The Suburbs

[January 7th, 2009]

One of the more significant scenes in Revolutionary Road—both the devastating 1961 novel by Richard Yates and the new cinematic adaptation by Sam Mendes—arrives when Frank and April Wheeler, a bushy-tailed young couple with a perilously high view of their own potential, find themselves in complete agreement with a madman. He’s John Givings, the institutionalized son of their neighborhood real-estate agent, and they’ve been humoring his Sunday afternoon sherry visit to their suburban home when he catches Frank nattering on about the “hopeless emptiness” of American life. “Wow. Now you’ve said it,” John concurs. “Maybe it does take a certain amount of guts to see the emptiness, but it takes a whole hell of a lot more to see the hopelessness.”

When this speech is translated to the screen version of Revolutionary Road and delivered to Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, it takes on an extra, ironic layer: Filming this book in 2008 feels like an empty gesture, and by the first week of 2009, the picture’s Oscar chances are increasingly hopeless—it’s an awards-season footnote, tepidly received. A predictable downfall, you will agree. The sterile vacuum of suburbia is a subject that Hollywood hasn’t exactly shied away from addressing, and the story of one more marriage smashed upon the rocks of conformity and alienation—a story written in 1961, about The Way We Live Now—isn’t exactly screaming its pressing relevance. And let’s face it: You don’t want to see Revolutionary Road. It sounds like a major buzzkill. Just thinking about seeing it gives you the same anticipatory tightness you got before visiting your family during the holidays. There’s going to be a lot of sloppy drinking and some loud fights, and afterward you will feel lousy about those poor ancestors trapped by their generation and their unknowing choices. What time was that showing of Slumdog Millionaire again?

You’re not wrong. But you should see Revolutionary Road anyway. You should see it because, of all the year-end prestige releases, it is one of just three (along with Slumdog and Frost/Nixon) that is any good. You should see it because Leonardo DiCaprio is spectacular in it, and because Kate Winslet is even better. Most of all, you should see it because it is Sam Mendes’ apology to you for American Beauty.

That 1999 movie, which you may remember for its rose petals and its unbearable smugness, was a film about being superior to the suburbs. Revolutionary Road is a film about people who think they are superior to the suburbs, and find out very differently. And on that level, Mendes has created a piece of art that, for all its glossy decorousness, cuts very close to the bone. Frank Wheeler may be lost in a sea of gray flannel suits and April may dream of bohemian France, but what makes them recognizable (terrifyingly so) is that neither of them will commit to the reality of their own existence. They keep it at bay with mutual appreciation of their own exceptionalism and supercilious trash-talking of their neighbors (especially best friends played with marvelous insecurity by David Harbour and Kathryn Hahn). They will flee to the continent at first opportunity; they are Americans in Paris—any day now. They are the high-romantic couple on a great ship. Their lives are euphoric, so long as they are never forced to acknowledge they are living them.

But Frank is a coward and April is a noodge, and they quarrel so violently because each is the only one who can see through the other as a fraud. At least they’re the only ones until John Givings shows up to take everything away. Played by Michael Shannon with an instability that brings to mind Jimmy Stewart overdosing on speed, John mercilessly exposes the Wheelers’ disdain for the ’burbs as a disguise for the hopeless emptiness inside themselves. What emerges is a rebuke not only to American Beauty but also to Weeds and Mad Men and all the dramas that allow their viewers to feel better than the characters they’re watching. “The Revolutionary Hill Estates had not been designed to accommodate a tragedy,” Yates wrote, but the culminating shots of Revolutionary Road show that for those of us intent on running down to darkness, any place will do.