Well That Sucked

[oselle]

My neighbor invited me over for a drink last night and she decided to Pay-Per-View a movie and there was My Bloody Valentine on the menu but I couldn't exactly ask a 70-year-old woman with a broken leg to sit there and watch a Jensen Ackles splatterfest with me so she picked Revolutionary Road and MAN, do I wish we'd gone with Jensen in a tanktop.

RR is the story of a young couple, Frank and April Wheeler (Leo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet) who feel suffocated by their 1950s suburban lifestyle so April has the brilliant idea to up and move them and their two kids to Paris! where, according to April, "people really live" unlike, apparently, Connecticut, where they just die slowly in their neatly shingled split-levels. The "plan" is to rediscover their joie de vivre in the stimulating atmosphere of gay Paree where April believes she can support the family as a foreign service secretary while Frank will be at leisure to "figure out" what he wants to do with his life.

They don't know anyone in France and don't even speak French but somehow this idea seems better than a nice house in Connecticut and steady income. Alas, Frank is offered a raise and a big promotion at his Manhattan business-machines firm and begins to reconsider the viability of the whole Paris thing...especially after April finds out she's pregnant with their third child. With manically cheerful desperation she informs Frank that as long as she gets an abortion before the 12th week it'll all be fine. Frank favors staying in Connecticut and having the child over "chasing a fantasy" and a bitterly ugly fight ensues. For some inexplicable reason, the couple never considers moving back to Manhattan which seems like it would have been a highly acceptable compromise -- Frank could keep his job, April could find greater mental stimulation on the hipster streets of say, Greenwich Village (which was a burgeoning hotbed of artistic creativity in the 1950s)...and they could probably buy themselves a charming brownstone that within 30 years or so would be worth over a million bucks. But NO, it's Paris or bust.

In between all this both Frank and April have brief sexual dalliances, he with a secretary and she with a neighbor's husband. A local mental patient shows up to support the Paris idea and I guess we're supposed to imagine that his schizophrenia has given him a sort of noble-savage clarity and wisdom that's lacking in the self-deluded suburban automatons around him but hello, HE'S A MENTAL PATIENT. Blah blah blah, after another appalling argument with Frank, April flips out and gives herself a DIY abortion and bleeds to death. Frank packs up their two kids and finally moves back to Manhattan where he gets in on the ground floor of the computer age under the tutelage of his old boss at Knox Business Machines. As far as I'm concerned, that's as good of a happy ending as this story could have but you know...I'm sure I wasn't I was meant to see it that way.

I think I was supposed to see Frank and April as a couple of intelligent, creative, passionate people who got the life sucked out of them by the sterility and emptiness of 1955 suburban America. Problem is, the movie never establishes Frank or April as having any specific goals or ambitions. When we first meet them they're partying in some beatniky loft where April claims she wants to be an actress and Frank merely wants to "experience it all" or some callow bullshit like that. Basically they sound like every twentysomething dimwit who thinks that because they're young and attractive the world is their oyster and everyone will soon discover their fabulousness. Most people outgrow that phase, especially once they have children. They realize that gee, I'm not going to write the Great American Novel or be the toast of Broadway and what I really need to do right now is feed my kids and keep a roof over their heads and set aside a little something for my old age.

Over the course of the movie Frank comes around to facing this reality, reluctantly at first, but then embracing it. He doesn't want to sit idle in Paris trying to "find himself," he wants to take this job that will give them money to move, if they want, and to travel and to expand their world a little while still maintaining the stability that a family needs and that parents owe to their children. April doesn't want to hear it. She (and the mental patient too, btw) berate Frank for "running away" and for "hiding behind a maternity dress." Meanwhile poor Frank is the only person in the story who's acting like a real grownup. There comes a time in most people's lives when they have to put their dreams on a shelf -- especially when they never knew what those dreams were in the first place.

That's the crux of it for me, that what April wants is such an amorphous fantasy. She says she wanted "to be wonderful in the world." What the fuck does that mean? She has no idea and neither do we. There's no hint that she gave up an actual acting career or that Frank had any ambitions more "artistic" than looking cool with a cigarette. Considering their aimlessness, they've both turned out pretty well but they, or at least April, can't see that. She's an "artistic soul" with no talent or training to back it up and I guarantee she'd have been just as miserable in Paris or anywhere else. Wherever you go, there you are, as they say.

The series Mad Men covers similar territory and does it far more effectively. The prison of Betty Draper's suburban lifestyle is palpably oppressive -- she gave up a successful New York modeling career and is now stuck in Ossining with a skirt-chasing, incommunicative husband who lives for his job and his three-martini lunches and his string of mistresses. He treats her like a charming but dim little girl who cleans up nice enough for his client dinners where, on at least one occasion, he callously humiliated her in front of all his smug colleagues. I'd never want to be Betty Draper but I think I could try April Wheeler's life on for size. Unlike Don Draper, Frank Wheeler genuinely cares about his wife and children and really seems to be doing his best to be a man, at least by the standards of his day. He realizes that his own vague longings are childish and unrealistic and he buckles down to the business of being a responsible husband and father and yet is repeatedly ridiculed by his wife and a frigging mental patient for being a cowardly little boy because he won't go traipsing off half-cocked to Paris like some hobo.

Worst of all this movie supports what a lot of anti-choicers say about women who seek abortions -- that they're selfish or crazy or both. I'm firmly pro-choice and believe that women should have control over their own reproductive decisions but, as depicted, there's no way that April's decision comes across as being anything but deeply selfish or very imbalanced. She doesn't want to have another child because then there'll be no escape -- but it's never apparent that she has anything worth escaping to other than her own delusions of being "wonderful."

I wasn't around for the 1950s so it's impossible for me to view the Wheelers' lifestyle (now almost out of range for all but the most well-to-do Americans) as such a death sentence. A well-paying job with a pension and benefits and a virtually lifetime guarantee of steady employment? A single-income household that can still live very comfortably and provides round-the-clock nurturing care for the kids? Smoking, martinis and red meat for dinner? Is that really so awful? It sure doesn't look so bad from where I sit, mired in a lifetime of financial and career instability and facing a far bleaker and more insecure old age than my own parents. It's really hard to pity Frank and April when they've got what an awful lot of American families would kill for these days.

All in all, Jensen's tanktop would have been a far more entertaining and far less frustrating choice and I'm reminded why I'm so drawn to fantasy, sci-fi and horror and not such so-called "serious" fare. I'll take my fantastical bullshit served up straight with pretty boys on top over this sort of pretentious crap any day, thanks.

Comments

[caoil.livejournal.com]

I hesitated on renting this one, largely because of the mediocre reviews it got. I have a feeling I would have the exact same reaction as you have described here. As much as I love Kate, I don't know if I can be bothered to sit through this.

[oselle.livejournal.com]

A lot of the reviews I read were positive, but I think that had more to do with Kate and Leo's performances. Then again I read reviews that described it as "brutal" and "devastating" and no one seemed to question whether or not April really was just a self-absorbed lunatic. I could have accepted the whole thing a lot more easily if the couple hadn't had children and if they hadn't dragged in the whole abortion story but jeez...anyone who can't accept that having children changes your life forever really needs to grow up, fast, no matter what the era or the social mores.

[tskterata.livejournal.com]

Ugh. That sounds like the kind of movie that would have me wanting to kick in the TV screen. Thanks for the warning.

Your review has made me curious as to what you thought of some other "good" movies. Like American Beauty. I hated AM and just about every character in it, but especially Kevin Spacey's character who abandoned his family just so he could be sixteen again.

Also. When presented with a selection, Jensen in a tanktop is *always* the right choice.

[oselle.livejournal.com]

It shouldn't surprise you that Sam Mendes directed both Revolutionary Road and American Beauty. RR was based on a book written in 1961 and I can see why Mendes chose to adapt it -- it covers a lot of the same territory as AB, in both movies we're expected to sympathize with an incomprehensible character and both movies also use the device of having a loony social outcast act as some sort of "voice of truth" -- there's so much similarity that I wonder if Mendes read RR before he made AB.

I should have just asked, "What Would Jensen's Tanktop Do?"

[tskterata.livejournal.com]

Ah. I did not know that Sam Mendes directed both. Someone to be wary of.

And Jensen's tanktop would cling to Jensen's naked chest, just like we would do given half a chance.

[oselle.livejournal.com]

I think Sam Mendes directed Road to Perdition which is a visually stunning movie that I absolutely love, but that was based on a graphic novel so there we go with the fantasy fare trumping so-called "reality" again.

Jensen's tanktop was exceptionally clingy in MBV. A very smart undergarment if you ask me.

[tskterata.livejournal.com]

See, now you've made me run to IMDB to see what else he's done. I never saw Road to Perdition, but I shall add it to the "to rent" list.

I did, however, see Jarhead, or most of it anyway. It was really long and we turned if off about twenty minutes before the end because, once again, there was nobody worth knowing in the film.


I really need to learn how to italicize in comments......

[ariadnes-string.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the heads up (again)! I've been curious about RR, especially since, in general, I could watch Kate Winslet read the phone book (never been too into Leo, though). It sounds pretty annoying, though, especially in comparison to Mad Men.

I've also been curious to see KW in Little Children , another suburban ennui flic. Have you seen that? I actually read the book, and it was pretty good--

I completely agree with you about Betty Draper, BTW. I loved the first season of MM, and am slowly making my way through the second on itunes, but I think they do an amazing job with that character--making you empathize so much with someone you (well, I) would probably really dislike if you met her in RL (they do the same thing with Don). But you can just feel how much she wants that perfect suburban life with the handsome, successful husband and the riding stables (!), and at the same time completely hates it. And can't ever, ever admit the contradiction. The actress looks like such a barbie doll, too, but she really nails it.

[oselle.livejournal.com]

Haven't seen Little Children because it seemed like more of this sort of suburban suffocation thing, although that takes place in present time, doesn't it?

Mad Men is an extraordinary show with some of the most complex and realistic characters I've ever seen on television. You get the feeling that Betty could be happy if she was with someone who really cared about her and respected her, but Betty's just one more piece of scenery in Don's sham of a life and that's exactly how he treats her. Don't know if you've gotten up to the disastrous Heineken dinner party episode but it offers such a devastating example of the thousands of small, soul-crushing indignities Betty has to endure as a model wife, and just as a woman, of that era. If anything like that had been brought into April Wheeler's character I might have been able to drum up some sympathy for her, but it just wasn't there.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Wow. This would drive me crazy. I remember reading a review comparing it to the book and I wonder if the book comes across differently.

Reading this made me wonder if you've ever read Babbit? That book seems like a better portrayal of people in the suburbs.

[oselle.livejournal.com]

I was also wondering if the book offered insights into Frank and April that weren't in the movie, but the reviews I've read say that the movie is very faithful to the book so I suppose not. No, I've never read Babbit...that's from an earlier era, isn't it?

[the0neru.livejournal.com]

Comment redacted because LJ was being pissy about cut-tags and I didn't want to post spoilers for the novel. I posted it here if anybody wants to read what I thought about it.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Yup, Babbit's in the 20s. It's kind of a portrait of an asshole.

[pearlette.livejournal.com]

Your opinion of the film exactly reflects my own. I thought that April was a self-centred, self-absorbed whiner who needed to grow up and never did. And her reasons for wanting the abortion were awful, I agree. *shudder* She was emptier than the provincial people around her who she so despised.

And word on the '50s. A lot of things about that decade were oppressive and off-kilter (unless you were a white, heterosexual male!) but it's not like everything was bad. Each era has its virtues and its flaws. And there is a lot to be said for family and financial stability ...

I love Kate as an actress, but she plays another annoyingly self-absorbed woman (and does it very well!) in Little Children ... which is another terminally depressing film. :p It starts off well, but you've lost all sympathy for Winslet's character, and the male lead, by the end.

Mad Men is fantastic. I just caught the end of the second season on UK TV and berated myself for not watching this wonderfully intelligent, gorgeously acted, piercingly perceptive series earlier.

[oselle.livejournal.com]

I think Revolutionary Road suffers from having been written during the era when it took place (the novel was published in 1961). Maybe the author's point was obvious to people who would have been reading the book during those times, but it doesn't stand the test of time. There's a certain lack of perspective there or maybe a lack of explanation -- we need to understand why April and Frank feel so trapped or what they've given up for this safe, suburban life. The movie doesn't ever show us that and I understand that the movie was very faithful to the book, so I'm assuming the book never shows it either.

Mad Men is so freaking good it's a little scary. I thought the second season faltered a little but the first season is an absolute masterpiece.