Sam Mendes tells the story of the courtship of April and Frank Wheeler in a series of vignettes so brief and overshadowed by everything that has come since, that we get the feeling that they can't remember being happy. Much of the rest of the story is their attempt to recover what they had or what they thought they had for a moment.
I must confess that I approached the film with a great deal of anticipation. On more than one occasion, I have imagined what kind of "dream team" I would assemble were I a film producer, and three names that most regularly show up on my list were involved in the making of this film: Mendes himself (ever since American Beauty bowled me over), Roger Deakins (the D.P. who certainly deserves consideration in the "Most Shafted by the Academy" award), and composer Thomas Newman (who could be a runner-up for same, said award). In addition, I must also admit to being a bit obsessed with the film's central theme of the deadening effects of the American suburb. I have felt those effects, and I have witnessed churches that have only reinforced the culture's emphasis on the need to look materially successful and socially together when they should have been proclaiming our own ineptitude. In addition, the fact that Mendes had already addressed the topic so bitingly in American Beauty led me to expect from this film a kind of development of his own ideas about those effects, but not only was this film much more tragic in its handling of those themes, I am even now finding myself wondering if this picture might have marked a retreat from that beautiful piece of satire.
The film has hardly introduced us to Frank and April before we see them at each others' throats, and the undercurrent of all of the screaming is one of settling. Frank struggles to find a purpose, which we get the sense is tied to his vocation, but he settles into a middling position at the same company where his father worked to apparently no distinction. We suspect from April's performance in a poorly received performance of a play that she at least attempted to pursue some ideal version of her dream before settling on a life of the ordinary. (One might be reminded of Ricky Fitts's brutal attack on Angela in AB for being "boring" and "ordinary.") Much of the tension of the rest of the film is between their (mostly her) urge to break from the boring life of the suburbs and those forces that would suppress anything extraordinary. These forces do show up subtly in the allure of financial success, the opportunity to prove oneself, and that oft-used and overdetermined symbol, the house itself. Even (I might say, especially) the children, who aren't so much born into this household as materialize out of thin air, threaten to anchor this couple to mediocrity, according to standards that remain amorphous throughout the film, but which we are led to believe may be solved by a bold move - literally - to France.
As I watched, superb performances and expert direction kept me rooting for them, hoping for them to be able to break out of the mold and get away, even as it grew more obvious that they would not be able to do so. To some degree, I was frustrated by how their inability to leave Revolutionary Road reinforced the perception that in France everthing would be different. We all know from our own experiences that merely relocating does little to change our identities and consequent behaviors, but that France as a symbol remained a distant beacon, even as things in the American suburbs were falling apart, seemed to contradict that reality.
To illustrate, bear with a brief digression. My family has a bit of wanderlust. In the fifteen years of marriage, my wife and I have moved five times; this makes me relatively stable by my own family's standards. From the time I was born until I left for college, I moved eighteen times, and most of these were cross-town moves because the neighbors turned out not to be so great, or the lack of neighbors was a factor we hadn't counted on being such a problem, or we didn't like the layout of the house after all. The point is that, while we were sophisticated enough to not admit it, there was a sense in which we hoped and expected the next place that would make it all good. Of course, it never did, and we were foolish in a fallen world to think that it might, but I have found myself reflecting on where that expectation that place should make all the difference comes from. To be sure, some of it does arise out of a refusal to address ourselves as the core of our own problem, but I why do we associate renewal so readily with place? Much has been made of the exact nature of the Garden as described in the early chapters of Genesis, and many exegetes discuss allegorical aspects of the nature of the heavenly city, but the intriguing part to me is that we will be a new people as we enter a new place and each will have been prepared for the other.
A part of me wanted to see the Wheelers get to Paris so that I could have a better sense of either a paradise in which their travails prepared them to inhabit a place that would seem as if it had been designed and waiting for them all along, or that I would see the real and pernicious effects of hoping for the place to make the people.
In the end, what we know is that something amazing has to happen before we can even get there.
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