Revolutionary Road is an exercise in alienation and atomisation. The story starts with April and Frank catching each other’s eye at a party, the upbeat jazz soundtrack reflects the original optimism.
April and Frank marry. At the start they are happy, discuss their dreams and aspirations. Seven years on, during the mid 1950s, April still aspires to be a actress, the play she stars in is an unmitigated failure. This creates more tension, stress, anger and frustration. Frank works in sales, catching the train everyday with the other drone like faceless anonymous people. There’s a scene where these workers are all walking down the stairs of the railway station in unison it really reminded me of Escher’s Ascending and Descending.
April, living an isolating existence, stays at home, takes out the rubbish, and does the rest of chores along with reminiscing what could have been. Frank is frustrated with his job. He’s frustrated with his empty loveless marriage so to fill that void he has sex with one of the secretaries in his workplace. When he starts to leaves her flat, the interaction between the two highlights the coldness and the perfunctoriness, the young secretary becoming embarrassed about her nakedness she covers herself quickly, Frank ending their brief tryst with, ‘That was swell’… pitched like a salesperson.
April has come to the conclusion that the only way their marriage is to survive is to move to France. They both wanted to be different and not capitulate to the nice house with nice picket fences. But it’s what they have done. They make plans and organise the move. Their neighbours are shocked. The husband makes no secret of his disgust that it will be April supporting Frank in France.
The idea of leaving this existence invigorates a spark of passion in their life. Frank thinks of his father who worked for the same firm for 30-odd years, doing the same job. His father used to take him out to lunch once a year. Frank tells the secretary he is having the affair with that he never ever wanted to be like his father…and yet here he is. Unfulfilled potential and lack of recognition dominate Frank, on a contradictorily level he wants to persue his dreams, to buck the trend but he wants the big house, the money, the status. And this dynamic creates further tension and alienation between April and Frank. And to stymie April’s dream of moving away he attacks her mental health and undermines her by threatening to send her to a shrink.
Frank’s further capitulation to the American dream, pushes April into further distress. Their rows escalate even more so when she discovers she is pregnant. She can’t handle another pregnancy. They spiral downwards into the mire and tragedy.
One of the most interesting characters in the film is John Givings (a neighbour) who has been an in-patient in the local psychiatric hospital. I was concerned how this character would be depicted but Michael Shannon (who is up for best supporting actor Oscar) delivers a nuanced and sympathetic portrayal. John holds up a mirror and reflects the hypocrisy, contradictions, misery and alienation that are inherent in the heterosexual nuclear family (Hopeless emptiness. Now you’ve said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness). He too has had his dreams and aspirations dashed as a Mathematician (37 times I had electric shock treatment and the mathematics gone) so he lives in hope for April and Frank to escape suburban drugedgy. This confrontational style unnerves and upsets John’s mother especially as she desires the perfect family while Frank and April like John. As they point it is the ‘crazy’ who understands them the best.
Overall, Sam Mendes creates a well crafted film that explores dreams and aspiration along with the tug of conformity, alienation and isolation. There were parts I found too stagey and theatrical (including parts of the dialogue!). Leonardo Di Caprio and Kate Winslet deliver fine performances but I think it is the more peripheral characters that give the film weight, the repressed neighbour played by Kathy Bates with her screwed-up son, John. The young couple next door who are the antithesis of Frank and April yet their conformity and capitulation doesn’t drive them apart. The cinematography by Roger Deakins is superb and brings further dramatic tension.
There’s a scene where April shouts, It takes backbone to lead the life you want, Frank, kind of encapsulates the film. The desperation of April especially exposes the sexism and double-standards women were expected to conform to (the neighbour who expresses his shock and disgust that it will be April supporting Frank in France).
As Betty Friedan (though she emphasised specifically middle class women and left working class women out of the equation) in her book, The Feminine Mystique, argued that women were expected to identify through their husband and kids therefore their own individual identity is lost. Lack of choices, expectations, sexual division of labour and unequal power relationships dictated the norm in a straitjacketed 1950s patriarchal capitalist society.
No wonder Valium was ‘mother’s little helper’ (for both middle class and working class women..my own mother was hooked on that drug for 20-odd years)… and no wonder April spirals downwards watching her marriage die, trapped, along with her husband selling out to the American dream. A living death for her.
The Wheelers wanted to be different, revolutionary and pursue their dreams while their friends and neighbours are unnerved and scared of this kick against the traces. The Wheelers washed their trauma out in public as opposed, like their friends and neighbours, to repressing it neatly, smoothing out the creases, then storing it at the back of their collective lobotomised minds.
And as April says:
