Revolutionary Road (Richard Yates, 1961)
* I can't agree that Shannon overdid it. I felt that his confrontation with DeCaprio was as crucial to the film's climax as that great scene in the end of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" when all the illusions finally are shattered.
* Excellent review. Thanks for re-emphasizing what seems to have been missed by a large number of reviewers, that the movie isn't merely some swipe at the suburbs. (For that matter, neither is the book.). Another brilliant review -- one of your best, and that's saying something.
* Like Edward and hokahey I might appreciate your analysis in part because I agree with it. But also I'm very impressed, again, by your smooth and engaging writing. You have a nice way of bringing images together to make your point, ie: "This time around, it’s the Wheelers who are upending and sliding into an icy abyss."
Swann's Way (Marcel Proust, 1913).
One of the major philosophical currents in Proust's day was the study of the nature of time. Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity inspired scientists and artists alike to reassess the meaning of time and the inherent subjectivity of existing interpretations of time. One of the most famous philosophers at the turn of the century was Henri Bergson, who believed in a more "natural" form of time called "duration," which "flowed" like music. Unlike the "homogenous" time measured by a clock, Bergson's duration had no pauses, but was instead an interconnected "interpenetration" of moments that were indistinguishable from each other. Proust adapted this idea to explain his theories about time and memory. He wrote that "we labor in vain" to try to recapture the past by means of the intellect; only the workings of chance will draw a person back in time to the moment he seeks. Proust compares his own theories about time and memory to the Celtic belief that the souls of deceased loved ones are held captive in objects; these lost loved ones are reincarnated only when a person brushes against or passes by these objects and recognizes the voices of these loved ones.
As Revolutionary Road makes clear, worse than not being special is believing incorrectly that you are.
Hyped as the film that brings back together again Titanic stars Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, Revolutionary Road is in danger of being remembered for a different reunion of Best Picture Oscar ingredients. It has hardly gone unnoticed, nor should it, that this adaptation of Richard Yates’ 1961 novel takes a tale of suburban depression and disenfranchisement and puts it into the hands of director Sam Mendes, whose American Beauty eviscerates the unspoken agony of Pleasantville-living. So let’s get this out of the way from the start: Revolutionary Road is no more about the suburbs than Casablanca is about a city in Morocco. Oh, sure, the setting counts. But to conclude that Mendes’ latest film is a condemnation of suburbia is to miss the point.
Revolutionary Road is a conviction of the Wheelers. Their crime? Denial. Yes, Mendes’ film, from a screenplay by Justin Haythe, makes good on opportunities to mock suburban living, but this is mere decoration, Suburbia doesn’t make the Wheelers miserable. Instead suburbia is the mirror by which they recognize their long-denied unhappiness. Characters turning 30, April and Frank are for the first time realizing that they have emotional wrinkles. As much as anything, Revolutionary Road is about that transitional period of life when your identity stops being about what you are “going to be” and starts being about what you “are.” When April, having pulled trashcans to the curb, stands at the end of the family driveway and looks up and down the street, she sees not just the numbing suburban homogeny of the 1950s but also a lack of opportunity. Revolutionary Road is a path to more of the same. The only way April’s life can evolve is if she forces the process.
Which is precisely what she does. A good 30 minutes of the film are dedicated to April’s proposed family escape to Paris. She’ll work; DiCaprio’s Frank will find himself; and together they’ll be happy, less because Paris is a utopian paradise (though uncultured April thinks it is) than because they’re doing something new and yet familiarly exhilarating: chasing a youthful dream. Revolutionary Road is ultimately about how all this empty dreaming produces agony – the Wheelers are a bickering couple when we meet them, and before we leave them they devolve into hatred-spewing monsters – but the pain of their crash landing is directly attributable to the grace with which the Wheelers’ hopeful Paris vision is allowed to soar.
One can know that the Wheelers are headed toward an emotional apocalypse, but during this cloudless portion of the film the storms ahead are impossible to foresee. This juxtaposition is crucial, and it’s the reason that Revolutionary Road separates itself from your run-of-the-mill grim art-house fare. Momentarily, these characters feel as if they actually have something to lose. Their potential to be special is just that, potential, but it’s enough to make us think that maybe, just maybe, the neighbors aren’t wrong to put the Wheelers on a pedestal.
Instead, all this potential comes tumbling down, and what’s never made clear is whether the Wheelers were deluding themselves all along or were indeed this close to liberation. This isn’t a complaint. Even the Wheelers don’t know the truth. To use the word that instantly recalls The Shawshank Redemption, the Wheelers have become institutionalized. Frank is like Brooks the librarian, so resigned to his prison cell that he panics when he gets an opportunity to leave it. April is like Andy Dufresne, refusing to give up hope. In this case, however, the desperate attempt at freedom ends with further imprisonment. By the end of the film, April’s verve has been completely obliterated.
For this, it would be easy to blame Frank, who is cowardly, dishonest and too slick for his own good. But April is equally naïve, and long before Frank told her that he wanted to go back to Paris, he admitted that he had no clue what he wanted to do with his life. It shows. DiCaprio’s performance is a marvel. He manages to let Winslet’s April maintain the spotlight without ever holding back. If Winslet, delivering perhaps the best performance of her impressive career, is the lever that lifts Revolutionary Road to greatness, DiCaprio is the fulcrum – essential and all too easy to overlook. Not that Deakins could make such a mistake. His slow-zooming camera adores the face of DiCaprio’s Frank: ashamed in front of his children; euphoric in Grand Central Station; and fearful across the lunch table from his potential new boss. In these moments, DiCaprio is nearly motionless. Later, however, as Frank becomes entirely unhinged with emasculated rage, DiCaprio pairs pathetic weakness and frightening ruthlessness with an in-your-face bluntness that few other actors could match.
Still, this is Winslet’s film from the moment we first lay eyes on April, ashamed on stage in a community performance she will forever remember for shattering her aspirations of becoming an actress. As the stereotypical closeted housewife of the 50s, April makes for an easy sympathetic figure, but that’s not all that she is. If this isn’t the best performance by an actress in a leading role this year, it’s at least the most impressive realization of a truly multidimensional female character. To Winslet’s credit, April’s optimism is as visceral as her desperation, her blind devotion to Frank is as convincing as her eventual vengeful betrayal of her husband and her guilt over not finding complete fulfillment through motherhood is as heartbreaking as her lonely domestic imprisonment. On top of all this, Winslet takes everything DiCaprio can throw at her without ever falling out of the frame. Simply put, she’s extraordinary. DiCaprio, too.
These actors have come a long way in just over a decade. The previous time Winslet and DiCaprio shared the screen, they had to compete for our attention with James Cameron’s multi-million-dollar prop. Not anymore. This time around, it’s the Wheelers who are upending and sliding into an icy abyss, and the scene compositions of Mendes and Deakins appropriately reflect the character study. In the final act, Mendes allows the drama to get a little too stagy – in part due to a Michael Shannon supporting turn that wows upon arrival before overstaying its welcome – but with Winslet and DiCaprio in the spotlight it’s hard to blame him for standing back and admiring the view. More than a decade after they became overnight mega-stars, Revolutionary Road reveals Winslet and DiCaprio to be two of the greatest talents in the business. And it’s interesting to wonder: had Titanic turned out to be the pinnacle of their careers, might Kate and Leo today be filled with the doubt that ravages April and Frank? Maybe. As Revolutionary Road makes clear, worse than not being special is believing incorrectly that you are.
Revolutionary Road is a conviction of the Wheelers. Their crime? Denial. Yes, Mendes’ film, from a screenplay by Justin Haythe, makes good on opportunities to mock suburban living, but this is mere decoration, Suburbia doesn’t make the Wheelers miserable. Instead suburbia is the mirror by which they recognize their long-denied unhappiness. Characters turning 30, April and Frank are for the first time realizing that they have emotional wrinkles. As much as anything, Revolutionary Road is about that transitional period of life when your identity stops being about what you are “going to be” and starts being about what you “are.” When April, having pulled trashcans to the curb, stands at the end of the family driveway and looks up and down the street, she sees not just the numbing suburban homogeny of the 1950s but also a lack of opportunity. Revolutionary Road is a path to more of the same. The only way April’s life can evolve is if she forces the process.
Which is precisely what she does. A good 30 minutes of the film are dedicated to April’s proposed family escape to Paris. She’ll work; DiCaprio’s Frank will find himself; and together they’ll be happy, less because Paris is a utopian paradise (though uncultured April thinks it is) than because they’re doing something new and yet familiarly exhilarating: chasing a youthful dream. Revolutionary Road is ultimately about how all this empty dreaming produces agony – the Wheelers are a bickering couple when we meet them, and before we leave them they devolve into hatred-spewing monsters – but the pain of their crash landing is directly attributable to the grace with which the Wheelers’ hopeful Paris vision is allowed to soar.
One can know that the Wheelers are headed toward an emotional apocalypse, but during this cloudless portion of the film the storms ahead are impossible to foresee. This juxtaposition is crucial, and it’s the reason that Revolutionary Road separates itself from your run-of-the-mill grim art-house fare. Momentarily, these characters feel as if they actually have something to lose. Their potential to be special is just that, potential, but it’s enough to make us think that maybe, just maybe, the neighbors aren’t wrong to put the Wheelers on a pedestal.
Instead, all this potential comes tumbling down, and what’s never made clear is whether the Wheelers were deluding themselves all along or were indeed this close to liberation. This isn’t a complaint. Even the Wheelers don’t know the truth. To use the word that instantly recalls The Shawshank Redemption, the Wheelers have become institutionalized. Frank is like Brooks the librarian, so resigned to his prison cell that he panics when he gets an opportunity to leave it. April is like Andy Dufresne, refusing to give up hope. In this case, however, the desperate attempt at freedom ends with further imprisonment. By the end of the film, April’s verve has been completely obliterated.
For this, it would be easy to blame Frank, who is cowardly, dishonest and too slick for his own good. But April is equally naïve, and long before Frank told her that he wanted to go back to Paris, he admitted that he had no clue what he wanted to do with his life. It shows. DiCaprio’s performance is a marvel. He manages to let Winslet’s April maintain the spotlight without ever holding back. If Winslet, delivering perhaps the best performance of her impressive career, is the lever that lifts Revolutionary Road to greatness, DiCaprio is the fulcrum – essential and all too easy to overlook. Not that Deakins could make such a mistake. His slow-zooming camera adores the face of DiCaprio’s Frank: ashamed in front of his children; euphoric in Grand Central Station; and fearful across the lunch table from his potential new boss. In these moments, DiCaprio is nearly motionless. Later, however, as Frank becomes entirely unhinged with emasculated rage, DiCaprio pairs pathetic weakness and frightening ruthlessness with an in-your-face bluntness that few other actors could match.
Still, this is Winslet’s film from the moment we first lay eyes on April, ashamed on stage in a community performance she will forever remember for shattering her aspirations of becoming an actress. As the stereotypical closeted housewife of the 50s, April makes for an easy sympathetic figure, but that’s not all that she is. If this isn’t the best performance by an actress in a leading role this year, it’s at least the most impressive realization of a truly multidimensional female character. To Winslet’s credit, April’s optimism is as visceral as her desperation, her blind devotion to Frank is as convincing as her eventual vengeful betrayal of her husband and her guilt over not finding complete fulfillment through motherhood is as heartbreaking as her lonely domestic imprisonment. On top of all this, Winslet takes everything DiCaprio can throw at her without ever falling out of the frame. Simply put, she’s extraordinary. DiCaprio, too.
These actors have come a long way in just over a decade. The previous time Winslet and DiCaprio shared the screen, they had to compete for our attention with James Cameron’s multi-million-dollar prop. Not anymore. This time around, it’s the Wheelers who are upending and sliding into an icy abyss, and the scene compositions of Mendes and Deakins appropriately reflect the character study. In the final act, Mendes allows the drama to get a little too stagy – in part due to a Michael Shannon supporting turn that wows upon arrival before overstaying its welcome – but with Winslet and DiCaprio in the spotlight it’s hard to blame him for standing back and admiring the view. More than a decade after they became overnight mega-stars, Revolutionary Road reveals Winslet and DiCaprio to be two of the greatest talents in the business. And it’s interesting to wonder: had Titanic turned out to be the pinnacle of their careers, might Kate and Leo today be filled with the doubt that ravages April and Frank? Maybe. As Revolutionary Road makes clear, worse than not being special is believing incorrectly that you are.
COMMENTS
* I can't agree that Shannon overdid it. I felt that his confrontation with DeCaprio was as crucial to the film's climax as that great scene in the end of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" when all the illusions finally are shattered.
* Excellent review. Thanks for re-emphasizing what seems to have been missed by a large number of reviewers, that the movie isn't merely some swipe at the suburbs. (For that matter, neither is the book.). Another brilliant review -- one of your best, and that's saying something.
* Like Edward and hokahey I might appreciate your analysis in part because I agree with it. But also I'm very impressed, again, by your smooth and engaging writing. You have a nice way of bringing images together to make your point, ie: "This time around, it’s the Wheelers who are upending and sliding into an icy abyss."
* There is a quote that sums up their conflict quite beautifully: "You don't want to run away with me - you just want to run away." -Rachel Menken
Swann's Way (Marcel Proust, 1913).
Proust also found inspiration for his work in the contemporary aesthetic philosophies of the visual arts. Despite the immense popularity of photography in his day, Proust considered painting a more "natural" expression of emotions. In addition to celebrating in Swann's Way the classical beauty of works by such Renaissance artists as Botticelli and Caravaggio, he attempted to capture the stylistic influences of one of the most revolutionary artistic achievements of the belle époque: Impressionism. He was fascinated by the works of Claude Monet and sought to emulate his form and subject matter; as a result, Swann's Way became a hallmark of French expression. (Sparknotes).
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
by Milan Kundera, 1984
by Milan Kundera, 1984
When The Unbearable Lightness was published, its author had been living for many years in France, and the book evinces more the influence of Rousseau and Stendhal than of Kafka or the Capeks. Kundera is a man of the Enlightenment, and is not loath (unwilling, reluctant) to champion reason over emotion, pointing out, as he has frequently done in his essays as well as his fiction, that many of the worst disasters mankind has suffered were spawned by those who attended most passionately to the dictates of the heart.
Kundera has a deep fascination with and horror of kitsch, a concept he returns to again and again throughout his work. In The Unbearable Lightness he writes of one of the characters, the Czech painter Sabina who lives now in America, being taken for a drive by a US senator who stops to allow his young children to play on the grass in the sunshine. For him, the senator declares, the sight of the gambolling youngsters is the very definition of happiness, at which there flashes through Sabina's mind an image of the senator on a reviewing stand in Prague smiling benignly down on the May Day parade.
"How did the senator know that children meant happiness? Could he see into their souls? What if the moment they were out of sight, three of them jumped the fourth and began beating him up?
"The senator had only one argument in his favour: his feeling. When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme."
These speculations lead Kundera to an essential formulation: "The brotherhood of man on earth will be possible only on a basis of kitsch."
Sabina is one of the quartet of main characters who perform the intricate set of variations that make up what there is of action in the book. The others are Tomas, a skilled surgeon who falls foul of the Czech regime and ends up as a window-washer; his wife Tereza, a barmaid who takes rolls of photographs of events in the streets of Prague during the 1968 Russian invasion, only to realise later that she has unwittingly served the secret police by supplying them with photographic identification of dissidents; and the lecturer Franz, who takes part in a radical-chic protest against the Khmer Rouge and dies at the hands of Bangkok muggers.
The hero of the book, if it has one, is Tomas. Like all Kundera's men, he is a slightly creepy character, cerebral to the point of bloodlessness yet an enthusiastic and even, in the later stages of the book, a maniacally dedicated womaniser - Tereza realises he is betraying her when she identifies the odd odour she has been detecting on his hair in bed every night as the smell of his many mistresses' groins.
One day it occurs to Tomas that those old communists who acknowledge there will be no socialist heaven on Earth, but defend their former actions by insisting they did genuinely believe such an apotheosis to be possible, should by rights follow the example of Oedipus, who, although innocent of crime, nevertheless put out his eyes when he discovered what misfortunes he had unwittingly brought about. When this thesis is published in the letters column of a radical Prague newspaper, Tomas is forced out of his job and has to take up general practice in a provincial town; however, it is the nature of totalitarian regimes never to forget, and eventually he is driven out of medicine altogether and takes up window cleaning instead, which he finds surprisingly congenial, not only because of the sudden "lightness" of his new life, but because the job offers endless opportunities for philandering.
Kundera is the most unjudgmental of moralists. When Franz tells Sabina that a philosopher had once accused him of having nothing in his work but "unverifiable speculation" one cannot help thinking that something like the same accusation might be levelled at Kundera. In the midst of much wan theorising, the most moving episode in the book relates the death of Tereza's and Tomas's dog Karenin, a wonderful character, and more vividly drawn than any of his human counterparts. Like JM Coetzee, a writer he resembles in several ways, Kundera has always been a passionate defender of animals, not out of simple sentiment, but in the conviction that it is by our treatment of animals that we most clearly display our essential and unforgivable arrogance as a species.
"True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists in its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental débcle, a débcle so fundamental that all others stem from it."
It is insights such as this that give The Unbearable Lightness of Being its significance. A novel, even a novel by so engagé a writer as Kundera, must be judged in terms of art, and not of its moral, social or political weight. There is too much spilt politics in The Unbearable Lightness for its own good. What is remarkable, however, is that a work so firmly rooted in its time has not dated. The world, and particularly that part of the world we used to call, with fine carelessness, eastern Europe, has changed profoundly since 1984, but Kundera's novel seems as relevant now as it did when it was first published. Relevance, however, is nothing compared with that sense of felt life which the truly great novelists communicate. And lightness, in art, more often seems like slightness.
The New York Times
COMMENTS
Published in Kundera's exile in 1984, The Unbearable Lightness of Being explores the idea of "lightness" and heaviness – emptiness and meaning – through the story of two couples; Tomas the surgeon and womaniser who loves his wife, Tereza, and Sabina, a painter conducting an affair with a Swiss lecturer, Franz. It's a tapestry of ideas woven through the lives of the characters by the teasing voice of the author-narrator. Can Franz begin to understand why Sabina is excited by betrayal, or Tereza appreciate what drives Tomas from conquest to conquest? They have been shaped by such different experiences they are unable to interpret each other's feelings and actions – with comic, sometimes tragic consequences. As a writer, it is the skill with which Kundera opens up that gap between perception and reality that I admire so much.
This is a shamelessly clever book – at times a little cold – but exhilaratingly subversive and funny. Kundera takes you by the scruff of the neck and shakes you pitilessly: "Is that what you really believe? Is that what you are like?" Can you ask more of a novel?
I believed in what Kundera describes as "The Grand March" to universal brotherhood that goes ever onwards through history. For Kundera this is "kitsch" (the triumph of sentiment over reason).
I became a journalist and set out with Kundera on a journey away from "the noisy foolishness of human certainties".
