Revolutionary Road strikes me as a curious name for a novel,
or a movie . . . or a street address. When I think of its implications, I
conjure up a battlefield, with a lot of Minuteman types carrying muskets and wearing
their hair in a pigtail. But Revolutionary Road is the title of the 1961
debut novel by Richard Yates that has nothing overt to do with the American
Revolution of 1776. Rather, it’s a domestic drama set in the leafy suburbs of
Connecticut circa 1955. The young couple who decide to start their family in a
big white house on Revolutionary Road are hardly revolutionary in the military
sense. Nor are they, really, American patriots. But after some thought I’ve
come to see Frank and April Wheeler as yearning for their own private revolution,
one that will raise them high above their earthbound suburban neighbors.
Once the novel was in print, Hollywood came calling, and a
screenplay emerged. But for many years no one came forward to produce this
morose story with its grim ending. Then British actress Kate Winslet, always
ripe for challenging roles, fell in love with the project and became determined
to play the female lead. Fortunately for her, she had a husband, Sam Mendes,
with his own Hollywood cred. Primarily a stage director, he had won an Oscar
for helming his debut film, 1999’s American Beauty, which like Reluctionary
Road took an intimate look at the collapse of an American marriage. Since
that time he had won more acclaim, particularly for his very dark and poignant Road
to Perdition (2002). When 2008 rolled around, he was releasing a movie that
starred not only his wife but also her close friend and one-time on-screen love,
Leonardo DiCaprio.
Also culled from the Titanic cast was Kathy Bates,
who had once played Molly Brown on that ill-fated voyage and was now asked by Mendes
to play a local realtor who befriends April and Frank. The key supporting role
of her truth-teller son was taken by Michael Shannon, a character actor who
ended up with the Academy’s single acting nomination for Revolutionary Road.
In all it was nominated for three Oscars (including Best Costumes and Best
Production Design), but won none of them. Most recently the versatile Shannon has
played the martyred President James Garfield in TV’s Death by Lightning and
a key judge in last year’s Nuremberg.
What is revolutionary about Revolutionary Road? It
focuses in on a married couple determined to live a life of their own choosing.
April, a frustrated local actress, is the one who comes up with the plan for
her husband to quit his workaday job so the family can move to Paris and
discover their bliss. Frank at first resists his wife’s urging but soon comes
to accept the idea that in Paris he’ll intuit how to really put his undefined talents
to use. They make plans and tell all their neighbors . . . but reality gets in
the way. And the couple eventually discover that their thinking is not so in
sync after all. The ending, when it comes, is tragic, and the final scene gives
the family (and us) little solace.
Which is probably why the film, well-made as it is, did not
drawn in audiences. In Titanic, Jack and Rose were a couple madly in
love, until an iceberg destroyed their dreams of romantic bliss. Here the same
actors show romance crumbling because of their own unrealistic goals. Ironically,
Winslet’s own eight-year marriage to Mendes didn’t last much beyond the film’s release.
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