Unpleasantville

As I started to read Richard Yates’s novel Revolutionary Road last week, I found that, against my will, I couldn’t get the pictures from the 2008 Sam Mendes film out of my head. I expressed my disappointment about the film in 2009. So much of it was very fine, especially the pictures themselves, photographed by the incomparable Roger Deakins. Frank and April Wheeler were played by Leo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. I thought little of DiCaprio’s performance as Frank. Besides being his usual cute but unprepossessing self, his inadequacy as a male lead was embarrassingly obvious. Why, for example, does he reveal to us his hairless chest more than once? (When, true to the period, he should’ve been wearing an undershirt.) Kate Winslet, however, is transfixing, making the absolute most of the character of April. But Winslet, I now think, made the character seem more interesting and deserving of a better life than she is in the novel.

I saw the film again recently and it seemed worse than I remembered it – almost as bad as the Laurel Players production of The Petrified Forest. The script, by Justin Hathe, lacks the rhythm and proportion of the novel. For instance, he makes the Wheeler’s house on Revolutionary Road far too large, the lawn turned into a magnificent green football field, Frank’s old station car is a giant whitewall-tire Chevrolet. The Campbell’s house, from which they could barely see the Wheelers’ over the treetops, is practically just over the hedge, their backyards abutting on each other. Everything is a great deal glossier, more expansive and ritzier than in the novel. Which makes it even harder to understand all the “hopeless emptiness”. (No two words ring more hollow than these when Leo DiCaprio enunciates them.) And, worst of all, there’s Leo himself. Frank turns 30 in the novel but Leo never looks a day over 16. What I wrote eleven years ago, when I reviewed the film, “He has struggled so valiantly, hasn't he, to convince us these past ten years that he can play a man. He is getting there” holds up. Now pushing 50, DiCaprio is still getting there. 

Some of the peripheral characters are beautifully observed, like Shep Campbell (David Harbour), Jack Ordway (Dylan Baker), Helen Givings (Kathy Bates) and especially John Givings (Michael Shannon), who is confined to a mental ward but is introduced to the Wheelers by his well-meaning mother. His utter lack of tactfulness, blurting out whatever happens to pop into his head, turns him into a kind of dramatic catalyst in the lives of Frank and April. 

But as I eased into the novel and the transparency of Yates’s prose, that provides such a vivid image of Frank and April’s lives, Leo and Kate’s faces were replaced with rather more detailed and more delineated features. “The year was 1955 and the place was a part of western Connecticut where three swollen villages had lately been merged by a wide and clamorous highway called Route Twelve.” The people in the novel all seem to be living some American nightmare, pursuing some fantasy vision of the life they should be living, the life they ought to have, and in some fantasy house and fantasy neighborhood – always slightly more upscale than the one they settled for. And the fictional housing development down Revolutionary Road seemed to be the one that had been perfectly realized, hadn’t it, in that otherwise patronizing 1998 film Pleasantville, whose only fatal flaw, “the falsity overarching the film,” according to Stanley Kauffmann, was “the assumption that the 1950s were actually as they were represented in 1950s TV.” Revolutionary Road very quickly dispels any such assumption. It explores, in fact, just about everything that 1950s TV left out.(1)

Christopher Hitchens pronounced the novel “dated,” because of its setting in, and its scathing portrait of, the suburbs. What dates it far more damagingly is Frank’s interference in what would now be called April’s “reproductive rights.” He actually does it twice, the first time before the action of the story begins. April has her first child, Jennifer, a few years earlier than planned, which entraps her. She makes the mistake of telling Frank that a friend has informed her of a surefire homemade abortion method (abortion wasn’t legal in New York until 1970). Frank angrily forbids her to go through with it. In the film, Frank is initially neutral, to April’s intention to go through with the termination of a third pregnancy, but admits he is relieved when April’s pregnancy passes its 12th week – the point of no return. Yates is also guilty of writing in a sexist third person that compartmentalizes women’s bodies and casually comments on the physical imperfections of his female characters but never the males’. April is criticised by both Frank and Shep for being “too heavy across the beam.”

Then there’s the drinking. You will find the word wine on three occasions in the novel, beer twelve times, martini seven, whiskey eleven and sherry, believe it or not, twelve times. The conspicuous consumption of sherry is, of course, a measure of the pretentiousness of Yates’s characters. Trying perhaps too hard to be true to the period, there was so much smoking in the film that they put a disclaimer in the end credits that the filmmakers were in no way approving of the use of tobacco products. 

But when the novel wound down to its climax and its aftermath (the death of April Wheeler), I caught myself lingering in the last pages, deliberately delaying the novel’s closing. Yates had managed to bring a world to life that, while not exactly inviting, and too close for comfort to the truth, was the more real for being lived in.


(1) Surely the emblematic moment in Pleasantville is when the 50s family’s father, George Parker (splendidly played by William H. Macy) comes home and announces, like always, “I’m home!” and just stands there when no one responds, even going into the darkened kitchen and repeating the announcement. The perplexed look on his face is priceless.