Dreams and Reality on “Revolutionary Road”

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.

 

 

 

A Close-Up of War Photographer Lee Miller

Regarding the new film, Lee, Kate Winslet can’t be accused of attaching herself to a vanity project designed to make her look good.  True, she served this biopic of World War II photojournalist Lee Miller as producer as well as star, reportedly laboring for five years to help it come to fruition. Now this sober but fascinating new work, a first directorial outing by veteran cinematographer Ellen Kuras, is in theatres, giving all of us a chance to focus on Winslet’s dedication to her subject. Her Lee is attractive enough to be a former model (as well as the muse and lover of avant-garde artist Man Ray, among others), and she lives her life as a expat in Europe with a kind of wild gaiety. (At a co-ed picnic on the grass in the south of France, she’s casually topless). But following the rise of Hitler, she leaves her partner behind in London to work as a photojournalist, first in occupied Paris and then behind the front lines in Germany as the War in Europe grinds to a close. This is a woman who can’t take no for an answer, who’s determined, at all costs, to exercise her talents and exorcize her demons.

 Lee may speak fluent French, but she’s  American-born, and she talks with a kind of raspy croak that perhaps hints at her future death from lung cancer. (She lights up so frequently during the film that I perversely feared moviegoers might have their lungs damaged by second-hand smoke wafting from the screen.) Never one to fuss with her appearance, she stalks through military camps and the streets of war-torn cities looking disheveled and ready to take on anyone who gets in her way. Curiously, she’s on assignment for the British edition of Vogue, a magazine much more associated with fashion trends than with war coverage. Yes, partly because the top military brass try hard to keep her away from the blood and guts of battle, she turns in her share of war photos from a woman’s perspective, like snaps of the intimate laundry of female personnel hanging from a military tent’s makeshift clothesline. But she also sees—and documents—what women go through in wartime, always showing sympathy to those (even on the enemy side) who have made the mistake of  trusting male lies.

 The film’s climax is Lee’s visit to the newly discovered concentration camps and railroad boxcars in which millions of Jews, dissidents, and others breathed their last. These horrific places answer for her the question of what happened to her missing French friends as well as others who were not considered acceptable by the Nazi regime. Her close-up photos of piles of rotting corpses, although at first rejected by Vogue as overly disturbing to its potential readers, are today considered invaluable documentation of what the Nazis did to hapless civilians. In the face of those atrocities, it’s hard to blame her for a slightly morbid jest: inside Hitler’s cushy former home, she cheerily photographs herself in the buff, soaking in his private bathtub.

 But all was not fun and games within Lee’s personal and professional life. We’re reminded of this in the cutaways to an aged and much-diminished Lee (still feisty, still smoking) being interviewed in her farmhouse by a dapper young reporter. The last of these interview scenes reveals several things about Lee we had not expected, contributing to our sense of her as complicated indeed. It’s worth noting that family members—determined to preserve Lee’s legacy—were deeply involved the making of this film, about a woman we should all know better.

 

 

 

 

 

Spreading the Word About “Contagion”

Who’da thunk I’d watch a disaster movie and feel . . .  nostalgia? But that was my first reaction when viewing Contagion, the 2011 medical disaster movie directed by the very busy Steven Soderbergh. I first became a Soderbergh fan after seeing 1989’s sex, lies, and videotape, a modest but emotionally dynamic chamber piece that won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and ushered in an era of adult-themed indies made by serious young filmmakers. Since then, Soderbergh has had a solid career in film and television, including Erin Brockovich, the multiple Oscar-winning Traffic, and a sexy George Clooney/Jennifer Lopez thriller, Out of Sight. For variety he’s helmed some lucrative franchises like Ocean’s Eleven and its sequels.

 When it was released in 2011, Contagion did nicely at the box office. Its impressive cast and far-flung settings attracted viewers around the globe, eager to see such major stars as Gwyneth Paltrow, Matt Damon, Marion Cotillard, Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet, and Jude Law fight off a worldwide pandemic. But I doubt anyone took it terribly seriously. After all, in 2011 we hadn’t endured a true global medical disaster for almost 100 years. Not since 1918, and the latter days of World War I, had the world seen the so-called Spanish Flu epidemic that took the life of my mother’s father, as well as millions of others. It was exciting to watch Paltrow and Winslet in the throes of a horrible virus, but we knew perfectly well that we and our loved ones were safe.

 That was then. Now that we’ve been through 3½ years of COVID, I could watch Contagion from a new, more enlightened perspective. A lot of what appears on screen seems all too familiar: the origin of the virus among tainted bats and pigs in a Chinese marketplace; the spreading of the disease, in those first innocent days, from simple hand-to-hand contact; the fear behind every cough as the world starts to catch on to what is happening; the grimly mounting statistics on the TV screen; the desperate urge for a vaccine that will return the world to the way it was before. The filmmakers presciently show so many things that became all too familiar in 2020, like the turning of football stadiums into mass hospitalization sites. And there’s Jude Law’s blogger character, who evolves into an anti-vaxer urging the public to avoid vaccination altogether. Sound familiar?

 Some things that are shown in the film fortunately didn’t happen in real life. First of all, the film’s eventual miracle vaccine is injected into the nasal cavity (yuck!), something we fortunately haven’t had to deal with. Secondly, though some of us did help strip store shelves bare of toilet paper, we didn’t run out of food and find ourselves making do with MREs, like the movie’s characters. Nor, at least in my experience, did real-life vaccine injection sites devolve into vicious brawls as people fought over scarce resources. Another of the film’s plot strands has the U.S. and its western allies cynically sending placebos overseas so as to hang onto the precious dosages for their own populations. In some ways we’ve been very lucky that these hideous movie scenarios haven’t played out for real.

 Yet the movie overlooks some issues that we’ve had to acknowledge in the real world. Like: the fact that deaths from COVID have been very much linked to social class, with hard-working ethnic minorities (of which the film has very few) bearing the brunt of the infection. Contagion’s innocence in such matters makes it seem rather quaint. Still, we can’t say we weren’t warned.

 

 

A Helluva Film About Two “Heavenly Creatures”

When a prolific English mystery writer named Anne Perry died in L.A. this past April. I didn’t pay much attention. Then I  discovered that, under her birth name (Juliet Hulme), she had been one of the two young defendants in a gruesome 1994 murder trial that set all of New Zealand abuzz. Back in 1954, two teenaged girls who had met at a tony all-female prep school and  become inseparable friends were worried about being parted when one was sent off to stay with family in South Africa. That’s why Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme conspired to murder Pauline’s mother in cold blood. Because they were both well underage, they escaped New Zealand’s death penalty for their crime, but were sentenced to five years in separate prisons. Ultimately each of them  left New Zealand, found religious faith (one of them as a devout Roman Catholic, one as a Mormon), and led unexceptional lives.

 The obsessive relationship between Pauline and Juliet was captured in 1994 by New Zealand filmmaker Peter Jackson in Heavenly Creatures. It was this film that introduced to the world two actresses, then teenagers, who continue to have an impact on today’s entertainment industry. Melanie Lynskey was 16 when she was chosen from among 500 New Zealand schoolgirls to play ugly-duckling Pauline; she has since had a long, rich career as a character actress in films and on television (Two and a Half Men, Yellowjackets). Kate Winslet, just a bit older and more experienced as an actress, soon came aboard as the more glamorous Juliet. One year later, she received her first Oscar nomination, as well as worldwide attention, for her supporting role in Sense and Sensibility. (In total, she has racked up eight nominations, winning the golden statuette in 2008 for The Reader.)

 Peter Jackson is of course best known for fantasy epics, including the masterful Lord of the Rings trilogy. Thinking back to my first viewing of Heavenly Creatures many years ago, I mostly recall the girls’ exuberant but ultimately lethal relationship. This time around, I was stunned by Jackson’s stylistic choices, and by the way he has inserted a fantasy world into a grim kitchen-sink kind of story. (Much of this material was taken directly from Pauline’s diaries.) The film, shot in Christchurch at the locations where the killing actually happened, unexpectedly begins with a kind of Technicolor promotional travelogue detailing the city’s charms: its leafy landscapes, its bustling city streets, its noble-looking institutes of higher learning. The locales we see in the travelogue appear to have no room for sinister behavior. But soon enough Juliet, the new kid in town, meets Pauline in a stuffy French class, and an obsessive friendship is born. Juliet, always the leader, includes Pauline in her imaginative construct of a “Fourth World,” a kind of pastoral heaven without the dreary religious stuff. At times we watch the two girls actually romping through this magical place. Elsewhere we see them role-playing the chief romantic protagonists in a fairytale kingdom of their own devising. Both girls like to draw and to fabricate items out of plastic, and these later become life-sized human and gargoyle figures that appear, armed with huge swords, in times of stress. One gargoyle also shows up, most unexpectedly, in a bizarre situation involving Pauline and one of the young male tenants who lodge in her parents’ home. It’s a key sequence that might help explain how far she is willing to go in resisting what she sees as her mother’s oppression.

 Prep school life, it appears, is far from prim.

 

 

Two Women: “Wanda” and “Iris”

 

By happenstance I recently saw two old films named after their leading female characters.  It’s always refreshing for me to watch a movie with a female focus. But Wanda and Iris couldn’t be more different.

 Wanda, from 1970, has nothing to do with a fish. (I loved the zany British black comedy, A Fish Called Wanda, which came out in 1988, featuring members of the Monty Python crew and a pre-Oscar Jamie Lee Curtis)  It is instead an ambitious indie, written and directed by Barbara Loden, an actress who had famously played the Marilyn Monroe role in Arthur Miller’s semi-autobiographical After the Fall at Lincoln Center. The play had been directed by the great Elia Kazan, who mentored Loden and subsequently  married her in 1966.

 Despite her years as an actress and a glamorous New York model, Loden understood from her own upbringing how a woman can be vulnerable to self-doubt and male manipulation. That’s why she chose to feature in her film-directing debut a blue-collar young woman from small-town Pennsylvania whose fundamental passivity makes her easy prey for conniving men. Immediately following her divorce (she arrives in court late, with her hair full of rollers) and the loss of all her cash, Wanda ends up in bed with a violent small-time crook who initiates her into a life of crime. This is hardly Bonnie and Clyde, in which a n attractive young woman discovers self-expression by learning to knock off banks. Wanda (convincingly played by Loden herself) is terrified, but lives for her man’s faint praise when she follows his lead.

 Despite its title character’s dependence on male approval, Wanda is considered a pre-feminist landmark, parly because it’s the rare film of its era made by a woman. It’s a straight-forward character study that knows how to put its limited resources on the screen. Upon release, it won an award at the prestigious Venice Film Festival. Years later, it was lovingly restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and in 2017 was inducted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. Though Loden next planned a cinematic version of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, she succumbed to cancer at age 46. 

 In contrast to Wanda, with its unsung heroine, Iris (2001) is about a very famous woman indeed: the much-honored British novelist Iris Murdoch. I’m often annoyed by films that hop around in time, but this one justifies its complicated structure by playing the college-age Iris (Kate Winslet) off against her elder self (Judi Dench). The youthful Iris is vibrant, reckless, and intensely sexual; her older counterpart is a revered public figure, until she starts succumbing to the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease. Thus we cut from young Iris blissfully ocean-swimming in the nude to the old one recoiling in terror from the sea. Both actresses have been lauded for their performances, but equally impressive are Hugh Bonneville and Jim Broadbent, who play Iris’s ever-loyal swain-turned-husband, a scholar named John Bayley. Broadbent was to win a well-deserved Oscar in his supporting role. The film is based on the memoir Bayley published after Iris’s death, and one of its central strands is the ordeal of watching someone you love disintegrate before your eyes into a person you don’t know.   

 The British film industry is so good at exploring complicated lives. Having seen this intelligent, beautifully conceived film, I’m eager to spend more time with Murdoch’s fiction. But the exploration of her lapse into dementia also remind me, oh so painfully, of my grandmother’s similar decline. Is Alzheimer’s the cruelest disease of them all? 

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