REVOLUTIONARY ROAD review

To all my fellow critics out there, and anyone who’s felt the need to prop this film up – come on people, is this movie really that great?? I have to admit, having finally gotten a chance to see this year-end cinematic critical darling; I’m a little bewildered. Where most see brilliance, I see the wrong kind of artifice, and feel ambivalence. But I’ll get back to that. For starters, I’ll toss out some other semi-random thoughts that the experience of “Revolutionary Road” inspired…

When one considers the ideological chasm between the messages of most children’s films (Believe in Yourself!) and a lot of the highly touted films directed at adults (life is empty and hopeless), it gives one pause. Which is it? Yes, life can suck, and Believing in Yourself above all else is most likely a road to certain disappointment, if not worse. So are we lying to our kids? To some extent, probably. But on the flip side, how many times do we need to hear that it’s all for nothing? Wayne Coyne of the band the Flaming Lips, when commenting on his recent film “Christmas on Mars”, basically said that life is ultimately meaningless, so it is up to us to find our own magic, our own happiness. While that idea may seem to straddle the above notions of the great positive and the great negative, it’s actually a tremendously negative idea. He says that ultimately, it IS all for nothing. But at least “Christmas on Mars” allows for innovation and wonder. The characters of Sam Mendes’ “Revolutionary Road” are tragically well beyond such mental platitudes. As wearing as they can be, stories like theirs are certainly worth telling. The true problem with “Revolutionary Road” is the way it goes about it.

Much has been made of the performances by the lead actors, a triumphantly reunited Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. They do indeed give their collective all to this material, but the notion of “Titanic” stunt casting never quite escapes the big picture. DiCaprio, as good as he is, delivers what has to be called a good Leonardo DiCaprio performance – meaning, like John Wayne and Tom Cruise before him, the movie star and the mannerisms he’s known for (and loved for) never go away. Winslet, by comparison, is a much more effective chameleon, but her cover is consistently blown by having to spend the film with Leo. Whenever the notion of “the Titanic couple” crosses the viewer’s mind, she’s outed by association.

They play what we’re told is a typical American 1950’s suburban couple, grappling with the extreme repression and phoniness of the era in the most repressed and phony area (the suburbs). They have kids (whom are barely seen), dream a little, and drink and smoke a lot, but mainly, they exchange blank stares, argue, and wonder what they ever saw in one another. Devoid of any true faith or depth, this is the Hell they get. Ingmar Bergman, who specialized in telling couple-based stories of hopelessness and emptiness, covered this terrain brilliantly again and again during his great career. When comparing his work to this film, “Revolutionary Road” is junior level at best. Of course Mendes is no Bergman, but for a moment, consider the amount of prestige that has been heaped upon Mendes in his relatively brief film career. With only a handful of films under his belt, he’s become one of the most prominent directors among a handful of filmmakers whom critics by and large are simply unwilling to criticize. Bergman may’ve been another such director in his day, but the difference is, Bergman consistently lived up to the hype, whereas Mendes almost consistently does not.

The prime offender in Mendes’ bag of tricks is the use of Michael Shannon as a certified mental patient who comes around throughout the film to flamboyantly speak his mind, and act the part of truth-sayer. Never mind the shallow notion that someone bold enough to speak unpleasantries in 1950s America simply MUST be insane – this character is purely a lazy device on the part of the screenplay. In the Mendes oeuvre, this hammy character’s forced existence in the film is second only Chris Cooper’s closeted gay military man in the similarly woefully over-lauded “American Beauty”. These characters, in otherwise thoughtful pictures, serve to yank us away from the perceived realities, and inform us in a very base way of what we’re already watching. A true cynic could even accuse Mendes of not trusting the actors enough to communicate the nuances of the film. Certainly, he doesn’t fully trust his audience.

Granted, I’ll admit I’m being a bit hard on “Revolutionary Road”, but upon finally seeing it, after having read one glowing review after another, and noting its presence on a great many year-end best-of lists, I’m more than a little disappointed. We’ve seen all of this done better before elsewhere, and more creatively. (Thank you Hollywood, we get it – suburban life sucks!) (Although I come from the suburbs, and oddly enough, it did not suck. Hmm.) I’m not sure the particular time and place reflect contemporary society in a the necessary way to bring out the bulldozer of current-day resonance that a film like this truly needs in order to maintain its level of adoration over time. Try as they might to draw the parallel, the Bush America of the early 21st century is not the Eisenhower America of the 1950s. Thus, “Revolutionary Road”, with all its precision era-accurate set decoration, becomes a domestically fused historical recreation.

So there, I said it. It’s an unsatisfying film. “Revolutionary Road” brings precious little that is new to the table. Yes, Kate Winslet does a great job of keeping that table free of crumbs, and DiCaprio keeps it stocked with empty glasses in the best Movie Star sense, but when the said table is built on the foundation of shallowness, argument, emptiness, and doom, one had better do a better job of actualizing the reality than this.

“Revolutionary Road” is a flat road that faces into the past in a contrived, award-baiting manner. Perhaps Academy voters will relate to the message of life being not just empty but hopeless, but that’s just not my worldview. But that’s not why I ultimately condemn this film. “Wall-E” and “Kung-Fu Panda”, both above average films, overdo it in the opposite way - but I’ll take their animated reality over Mendes’ meticulous portrait of 1950s suburbia. To go back to the beginning paragraph and Wayne Coyne’s “Christmas on Mars”, that film, while being the opposite of meticulous, is a much more effective negative-worldview film in its own slapped together, low-rent way. It is down to earth in a gloriously celestial way, whereas Mendes’ cynically fused view of the past, mired in contrivances and going through the motions, feels a lot more alien.

- Jim Tudor