Revolutionary Road

A film changes quite a lot for me when I find out what the intention was behind making it. It took me a second viewing of Zodiac, after all, to realize that it was meant to be that slow and frustrating. So, I guess I'm hoping that Sam Mendes intended the audience of his fourth feature to feel as though whatever tethered Frank and April Wheeler together was long dead.

My best estimate is that it takes less than 10 minutes for the unhappily wed couple to get at each other with some raw verbal combat. Ten minutes of screen time, that is - the film skips over their perhaps rosier early years. It's ugly and foreboding, and exceptionally well performed. Leonardo DiCaprio is satisfied here to take a role that is anything but glamourous - Frank is a bastard and a coward, and the film wastes little time getting you to that conclusion. April, as performed with naked desperation by Kate Winslett, is a woman stripped of her dreams, one by one. She starts out with great fortitude as a character, but she is gullible. She is betrayed by Frank; she allows herself to be betrayed by him.

I suspect there will be two distinct readings of this film - one by the wed and one the unwed. I read elsewhere a reviewer horrified by the film and the way that it undermines the mental image of marriage by poking at every insecurity felt by those in one. For a single person like myself, it's far more cautionary, like an extrapolation of watching that couple you know who don't belong together but stick with it anyway. This, I think we are meant to fear, is where they are headed.

You know from the get go that Frank and April won't escape the mess they've gotten themselves into, so you can't help but wonder at the point of all this. The trappings of marriage have been explored elsewhere, and this doesn't say anything new. As exquisitely performed as it is by all parties, with special notice going to Michael Shannon, the performances don't move us to like Frank or April, and I struggle to understand why that wasn't important.

We're never given an opportunity to see the Wheelers as a happy couple. In fact we're never allowed to see them as a happy family, either. Oh yes, did I mention that they have kids? That's where I'll leave it - the word count is proportionate to how much time they spend in the movie, implied or otherwise. Because we move so quickly to seeing them disintegrate, we can never care about where the movie is inevitably going. It goes to some bleak, broken places, but it's fated to. No matter how bad it is when we get there, the reaction isn't one of shock or awe, it's a grave nod of the head, because we all knew where this Revolutionary Road was leading.