Revolutionary Road

"Shut up!!" I hissed loudly in the darkness of the auditorium.

Immediately nearly everyone in theater pivoted their head in bewilderment. I couldn't believe what I had just done. For the first time in years, I was actually telling someone to shut up in a movie theater during the movie.

It was Monday afternoon. I was in Waltham once again, in the Landmark Embassy Theater, a place I have come to love, since I only see good movies there. It is worth the forty-five minute drive, through all the stoplights along Route 2 in Concord.

But the pair in the back row were just driving me, and the other twenty-odd patrons in the theater, crazy. Somebody had to do it.

It wasn't their loudness so much as the soft constant drone of the s-sound, up and down in volume as they whispered, commenting on nearly every action and line. Teenagers? No. Women in their sixities. Teenagers generally stay quiet during the movie (although they like text). They just don't want to attract attention, and moreover they can be shamed into silence. But certain older women just don't give a fuck. They come in groups with the idea of sharing their opinions with each other outloud in real time, and they just don't give a fuck.

Usually I would just change my seat, but there was no escaping here. One of the pair was in a high-seated motorized wheelchair. It was as if she was in a pulpit behind us, so we could all hear her whisper every syllable.

I might have been able to cope with it, but for the fact that the three older women in front of me kept pivoting their heads back to look at them each time the whispering commenced anew.

Then the scene arrived, the languid slow one where both DiCaprio and Winslet are alone at night, contemplating their solitude and apartness in the Third Act of the movie. It was the part of the film that most reminded of Mendes' previous masterpiece, American Beauty (1999), the creepy sequence leading to the climax where the Neil Young song "Don't Let it Bring You Down" serves as the soundtrack.

But that infernal whispering, and all the heads swiveling---I just couldn't take it anymore.

Afterwards I immediately felt like an ass, for having further broken the spell of the movie, especially at such a critical time, when the emotions and thoughts of the characters are to be read in close concentration on their faces, reflecting the actions that each is about to take. Why did I have to be the bad guy?

To top it off, my little outburst did no good. It had absolutely no effect. The two whisperers didn't even break stride. It is perhaps a law that those most likely to spoil a movie are the least likely to think that such verbal missives are directed at them.

The scene is question, the parallel nighttime contemplation by the two principals, is where I most felt Revolutionary Road to be a retread of American Beauty, albeit set in the 1950s. Thankfully I did not feel that way for most of the movie, although I feared I would.

Few things are more annoying than someone who refuses to like a movie "because it isn't like book." Wah wah wah. Who says the movie has to be anything like the book? Books and movies are different artistic genres, ones that are in large part incompatible. There is simply no way to adapt most novels to film in a way that does not leave out substantial chunks of the print narrative.

But Revolutionary Road, you see, is no ordinary book for me. It is one of my all-time favorite postwar American novels. My friend H-man handed it to me about seven years ago when I went to visit him in Washington, D.C. After I read it, we compared notes, and we both agreed that we had crushes on the April Wheeler character. The very phrase "April Wheeler," said in overly luscious appreciation, like Homer Simpson savoring a donut, became a humorous joke between us.

When I first read that Mendes had picked his wife Kate Winslet to play that role, I was bitterly disappointed. Winslet? But I was thinking of the chubby chick from Titanic (1998). Evidently she had been replaced by a different actress of the same name who was perfect for this part.

My big test for the movie would be: would they include the subplot involving John, the emotionally disturbed Ph.D. mathematician who is allowed brief visits outside the looney bin to visit his relatives, and who sees into the Wheelers' troubled marriage as if reading an emotional x-ray? Of all the characters in the book, it was John with whom I found the most identification. Yet it seemed like exactly the kind of side plot that would be left out.

But they didn't do it, screenwriter Justin Haythe and Sam Mendes. They kept him in. John had a huge role, as played brilliantly by Michael Shannon. It was everything I could have hoped for and more.

I also feared that they would kill the spirit of Richard Yates' 1961 novel. The reason I had loved it so much was that it had changed completely my view of American literature from that time, especially novels about the suburban nightmare. I had been used to John Updike, John Cheever, and all that kind of New Yorker-style turgid wandering that pooh-poohs too much coherent external narrative as some form of artistic cheat. When I read Yates, it just blew me away. Not only was it possible to tell real stories about suburbia, but ones that were simple, entertaining and deeply meaningful.

But if Yates described the emotional hell of characters, he did so in a way that felt lighthearted and buoyant throughout much of the story. It was so damn fun to follow his characters, a fact that makes the horrific climax of the story all that more, well, horrific. Yates sucker punches you in a way that brings the nightmare of 1950s America right into your soul.

Would the movie capture that buoyancy in the narrative? I had really doubted that it could. But Mendes was probably exactly the right choice for the director, because he nailed it, at least for me, as much as I could hope for. I didn't mind that he put his auteur stamp on it. Also Kathy Bates was certainly a big reason why it all worked for me.

There are things I could criticize about the movie. DiCaprio had to work a lot to make me believe him as a 1950s era salesman, but I did, in the end, believe him. I read one review that panned the movie because Winslet and DiCaprio "spend the entire movie screaming the subtext at each other." I suppose you might look it at that way. But I chose not to. Admittedly I'm prejudiced. I wanted to like the movie, because I didn't want one of my favorite books to be made into a sucky movie.

In some ways I think it's a superior movie to American Beauty, in that it doesn't suffer from the latter film's plot hole, i.e. the ridiculous premise of Lester's purchase of marijuana from a neighbor kid in front of an open lit window in a garage at night, in full view of his nosy neighbor, without bothering to close the blinds (nobody has ever done that in the history of the world). Also it is narrated by a dead person, which is sort of gag after Sunset Boulevard (1951). But I still think it's a masterpiece of comedic horror, and one of the best movies of the 1990s, a perfect portrait of America on the verge of the 2000 Presidential election.

Perhaps only thing that makes Revolutionary Road a less powerful film, in my opinion, is that whereas American Beauty was about the dysfunctional American suburbia of 1999, Revolutionary Road is a period piece, lending it a slight reserve in its artistic impact for the present day.

Also, what the hell is it with Thomas Newman, who wrote the soundtrack. As many have noticed, the soundtrack was exactly the same slow progression of piano chords as in American Beauty. Did Newman just recycle the same music? It was definitely a weakness of the film, not because it was inappropriate, but because it stuck out.

Yes, I wanted to like the movie, so I did. It was almost a perfect viewing experience. Curse those darned women in the back row, not just for annoying the hell out of all of us in theater, but making me feel like a heel for being the bad guy in the movie theater. Did I mention that I drove forty-five minutes to get there?