Hola all. Massawyrm here.
Every once in a blue moon, and I do quite literally mean that rarely, you see a film that is masterfully crafted, perfectly executed and absolutely flawless…save for one, tiny, insignificant detail: that you really dislike its story and everything it has to say. It’s been a very long while since a film so conflicted me as this film did, but here it is. As a film I can’t point out any flaws. I just quite simply do not like it. It is a frustrating, heartbreaking movie that fills you full of hope only to smash every last aspiration to pieces to make its point. A hopeless, bleak wasteland of a film, Revolutionary Road drives you out into the middle of nowhere and leaves your ass without a coat in hopes of showing you how easy it is to get conned into be driven out into the middle of nowhere on a cold day without so much as a windbreaker.
And yet, it is quite an accomplished ride into a desolate nowhere.
I don’t believe that Sam Mendes hates the institution of marriage, but this film might convince someone that he does. It presents us with three broken marriages, each of them an unhappy example of 50’s era desperation. On the outskirts of the story we have the old couple torn apart by a mentally unstable son. Next door we have a couple with something amiss, the revelation of which paints a heartbreaking PICTURE. And then we have our protagonists – Frank and April Wheeler. Now the casting of these two was a stroke of deranged brilliance. The film opens with us meeting our characters at the moment they first meet. We don’t see them fall in love. We don’t see them share their first kiss. We aren’t even treated to much of a meet-cute. Because we’ve already seen these two fall in love…in one of the most watched love stories of our generation. Putting two people together who made the whole world fall in love is a no brainer.
Putting them together in a film in which that love disintegrates into a loveless wreck on the other hand, is a stroke of fucking genius. It’s like watching a greasy sweaty porno of that Mormon church girl who annoyed you in high school getting plowed by three men with bacne and nine inch schvonces. You don’t watch this to feel those same familiar feelings. You watch it to see something beautiful broken to the point that it can never go back. And it is the casting alone that makes me WANT to like this movie so much. But I can’t. It’s just too hopeless.
Both Kate Winslet and Leo DiCaprio give their usual top notch performances. These two really are two of the greatest actors of their generation. And here each give layered, wonderfully rich portrayals of 50’s era lovers. He’s a cheating rat and she’s a frustrated housewife watching her dreams evaporate. So when they decide to throw their stepford suburban lives away to move to Paris on a whim, the movie becomes a hopeful treatise to love and how you can save a marriage – how you are free to step away from your life and say “I can change EVERYTHING I don’t like about this existence!” But you can’t. Or so the movie claims. I’m not certain if this is a full frontal assault on the traditional concepts of marriage or a cautionary tale of just what can happen to your life if you let it – the movie is never really clear about which message it wishes to get across to the viewer – but it certainly has a lot of terrible things to say about marriage.
As anyone who has been married will tell you, a marriage has its ups and downs. It’s not just a cliché. The ups REALLY are ups. There are days you wake up, take a look at your wife and think “Dear god, I don’t know why this woman puts up with my shit, but I thank the maker once a minute that she does.” And then you walk around with a smile on your face so wide it has to be pried off with a crowbar. I mention this because I first watched this movie while in one of those phases of my marriage – and this film was like a poison that seeped in and killed every molecule of joy in my body. It is a date killer, a 100% guaranteed method of contraception that will ensure you will not so much as get a quick handy from a girl in the car afterwards.
That said, everything else is perfect. Michael Shannon steals the film for the ten minutes he appears as the crazy, institutionalized son of the local realtor. He speaks the films truths, admitting what no one else has the courage to say out loud – and that makes him crazy in the 50’s. Sam Mendes direction is pitch perfect and he conveys every emotion he attempts to with all the grace of a world class figure skating. He makes it all look so easy. And the score, god the score is magnificently simple – reminiscent of American Beauty just enough to capture that spirit without for a moment feeling like imitation. Even the writing is fantastic. I might despise the story, but the dialog is clever and fantastically Spartan. There isn’t a wasted word anywhere in this film.
But I hate it. I never want to watch it again. The last 10 minutes are so WTF and in your face that it is a very hard movie to love. Which is why you see this film grace a few BEST OF lists without universally being up towards the top of the ones it is on. Incredibly effective AND affecting, this film is for those who enjoy a painful emotional roller coaster. But never ENTERTAINING. It is a film I expect to be nominated for a great many awards, but none of them for overall picture. Fantastic when taken in pieces, I can’t recommend this to any but the most masochistic of film lovers and award season completists.
Until next time friends, smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em.
Massawyrm
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