Book of love
Sunday, February 1st, 2009For Sale: On Revolutionary Road
“One thing I’m willing to bet [about a “Revolutionary Road” screenplay written in the 1970s] is that it made the Wheelers a lot more sympathetic than they ought to be. It was a common misconception when the book was first published, even among good critics. Quite simply, Yates meant for the Wheelers to seem a little better than mediocre: not, that is, stoical mavericks out of Hemingway, or glamorous romantics out of Fitzgerald. Rather, the Wheelers are everyday people — you and me — who pretend to be something they’re not because life is lonely and dull and disappointing.”
– Richard Yates biographer Blake Bailey in Slate (June 26, 2007)
Plot and thematic spoilers ahead.
“How do you break free… without breaking apart”? That’s the rhetorical question posed as a tag line in this trailer (above) for Sam Mendes’ titanic version of Richard Yates’ 1961 novel “Revolutionary Road,” starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.
But is that what “Revolutionary Road” — the movie or the book — is about? Does it even scratch the surface? I wonder if this is being sold as a story about two extraordinary people who might have fulfilled their promise… if they hadn’t been stifled by the suburban conformist pressures of America in the 1950s. If only they’d broken free and gone to Paris where people really feel things!
That isn’t what it’s about.
OK, so the trailer is only a sales pitch for the movie version, and “Revolutionary Road” would not be one of the great American novels if that’s all there was to it. Bear with me; I know they’re works in dissimilar media, and that one doesn’t physically alter the existence of other. Having loved the book many years ago (and now that I’m re-reading it about six weeks after seeing the Mendes movie), I wonder how much of my interpretation of the movie and its performances were colored by the novel… and what the filmmakers’ take on the novel is meant to be.
In the movie (and the trailer), April Wheeler (Winslet) says to her husband Frank (DiCaprio): “We’re like everyone else! … We’ve bought into the same ridiculous delusion… this idea that you have to settle down and resign from life.” And, for her, being “like everyone else” is a fate worse than death. So, April persuades her husband that they must move to Paris because, he’s told her, “People are alive there. Not like here.”
Meanwhile, everyone else here — at Knox Business Machines, on Revolutionary Road — says the Wheelers are attractive and promising and destined for great things. They see themselves as extraordinary, too, and the unfulfilled or unfulfillable dreams they nurture are among their mechanisms for keeping that layer of denial intact. They’ll always have Paris (even if neither of them ever did) because they need their idea of it to feel special. For Frank, at least, actually moving to Paris, therefore, poses a threat (and a gauntlet insidiously or unwittingly thrown down by April) that he isn’t equipped to face.
In a superb New Yorker appreciation of Yates’ work month, James Wood described the novel as a “nimbly prismatic” work that “does not allow us an easy point of agreement”:
it seems to offer a familiar critique of the suburbs, of the stripe we know from movies and books like “american beauty” and “the ice storm,” in which the streets are amok with hysterical housewives and angry soft men. …
Yet “Revolutionary Road” pointedly does not rely on those overfamiliar, superficial stereotypes. So it troubles me a little when a critic as good as Michael Wilmington (who, in fairness, notes that he hasn’t finished the novel) writes in his review of the movie:
yates, a bit similarly to john cheever, writes in that measure dry, chiseled, ironic, gleaming american expository writing that both castigates american stomach realm culture and, in an random way celebrates it — or at least celebrates the artists ensnared in it. the publication is about how marriages disintegrate and how artists and would be artists or outsiders suffer in the more materialist realms of eisenhower america, and that’s a meriting topic.
Assuming that is so, it’s only the tiniest piece of the subject of “Revolutionary Road.”
Likewise, I am aware that Sam Mendes trying to promote his movie when he gives interviews, but
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