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.

Revolutionary Road

"Tell me the truth, Frank. Remember that? We used to live by it. And you know what's so good about the truth? Everyone knows what it is however long they've lived without it. No one forgets the truth, Frank. They just get better at lying." - Kate Winslet, as April Wheeler 

The "truth" in the case of Frank and April Wheeler, whose drama is the subject of Revolutionary Road (2008), is that they haven't found happiness, and the prospects of finding it in the suburbs of Connecticut in 1955 will only get worse. Based on the first novel (1961) by Richard Yates, who was a kind of latter-day (and lesser) George Gissing, a chronicler of civilization's discontents, the film handicaps itself from the start by glossing over April's failure as an actress, which is the best explanation available for her subsequent actions, and which is made much of in the novel. All the director, Sam Mendes (who also happens to be Mr. Kate Winslet), allows us to see of this central disappointment in April's life is the look of chagrin on Frank's (Leo Di Caprio's) face at the curtain call of April's performance in a high school auditorium (1), everyone's polite avoidance of the subject backstage, and April's private tears in the dressing room. 

Driving home, Frank's words of consolation make matters worse and the couple pull off the road for an argument that reveals more resentment than either of them knew was there. From that moment the couple begin to drift apart. April is the catalyst because she is so purposeful. Frank, unfortunately, has grown comfortable with his morning commute. (One of the first indications that we are glimpsing a lost world comes early in the film on Frank's train trip to the city. When all the passengers disembark at Grand Central, everyone in the shot, mostly men, is wearing a hat.) April must stay at home, and the shot of her standing at the end of her driveway gazing forlornly down the empty street - incidentally called Revolutionary Road -, every driveway with its silver garbage can, is a potent illustration of how lost she is in that prosperous perfection, where everything has its place, even hopelessness. 

There is plenty of alcohol in the film, from hungover co-workers to martinis at lunch and scotch after dinner. And the cigarettes are ubiquitous. Dreamworks actually placed a disclaimer in the end credits, stating that they "did not receive any payment or other consideration . . . for the depiction of tobacco products in the film". That anyone would suspect, in 2008 that they had set out to represent smokers in a favorable or even glamorous light is somewhat astonishing. 

What is it exactly that makes the Wheeler's life in the suburbs such a nightmare? The paucity of intellectual pursuits? As photographed by the incomparable Roger Deakins (Pascali's Island, The Village, No Country For Old Men), designed by Kristi Zea (Goodfellas, Beloved), and costumed by Albert Wolsky (Sophie's Choice, Bugsy, Road to Perdition) I didn't see anything about their lives that was particularly terrible. Perhaps their early days in bohemian Greenwich Village made them make the mistake of thinking they were cut out for intellectual or artistic success, and not the materialist trap they find themselves in ten years later? But that they should agree that their lives are empty and that they must abandon everything - the boring good job, the boring beautiful house - and traipse off to Paris comes as a completely unconvincing surprise, to us and to everyone they know. 

The only other person who approves of their plan is a self-proclaimed certified lunatic. John Givings (Michael Shannon), who has undergone numerous electro-shock treatments, is like the Fool in King Lear (or so we are expected to think), who speaks the truth but whom nobody takes seriously. His schizophrenia, as the book specifies, was the result of his own hopelessness in the suburbs. In his sensitive essay on Yates's novel (2), Christopher Hitchens outlines why he now finds the book "dated": "How can people bear to suffer so much, one keeps wanting to ask, when no great cause is at stake? . . . The proposed move [to Paris] is so central to the action of the book that one regrets to find it unconvincing." The film compounds the problem by recreating suburban life in Connecticut in all its 1950s freshness and its well-groomed glory. Yates used this surface beauty as a kind of mocking contrast to the hopelessness at its heart. But it was so much easier for him to capture it in words. 

All we get in the film are those perfectly clipped lawns and beautiful cars constructed like tanks (when the Wheeler's have their side-of-the-road argument, Frank injures his hand when he punches the unyielding roof of his car, and later April has sex with Shep Campbell in his front seat!). Yates gives the period setting an all-too convincing reality and a poignance, even when it cannot commiserate with the lives playing themselves out thereagainst: "The Revolutionary Hill Estates had not been designed to accommodate a tragedy. Even at night, as if on purpose, the development held no looming shadows and no gaunt silhouettes. It was invincibly cheerful, a toyland of white and pastel houses whose bright, uncurtained windows winked blandly through a dappling of green and yellow leaves … A man running down these streets in desperate grief was indecently out of place." 

Since this is April's story, the film appropriately belongs to Kate Winslet. She is something of a wonder in contemporary film. The splendid roles which she is routinely offered now are only there because someone like her is around to play them. One could not say as much even for Meryl Streep in her heyday. She manages to communicate something of what Hitchens attributes to Yates: "If [he] had one talent above all, it was for conveying the feeling of disappointment and anticlimax, heavily infused with the sort of embarrassment that amounts to humiliation." 

Beside Winslet, Leo DiCaprio is merely competent as Frank. 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. Kathy Bates is wonderful as Helen Givings, the Wheeler's ultimately silly neighbor and mother of John, who had such high hopes that the Wheelers would bring a touch of class to Revolutionary Road. The film closes with her husband (Richard Easton) listening, but not listening (as he turns down his hearing aid) to her prate on and on about how the new residents of the Wheeler's house are such a perfect couple and the "right" people. 

Sam Mendes has such a sterling reputation as a theater director that it is a shame he cannot make a good film. I never blamed him, as some critics did, for American Beauty (1999). That film's great weakness was its script by Alan Ball, who has returned to television where he obviously belongs. For giving us another chance to marvel at his wife, we can be thankful to Mendes. Perhaps it would've been too much to ask for a better film? (1) The play was The Petrified Forest. (2) Hitchens' article can be found here: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200812/hitchens-suburbs