I was underwhelmed I’m afraid. Here are a couple of good reviews which say the film is good. So go ahead and don’t believe me. But for me this was (yet another) Hollywood film with good acting covering up a film that didn’t quite do it for me. (Others include the other Kate Winslet number at the moment – The Reader – and Rachael’s getting married.
The plot of revolutionary road is a young couple groaning under the weight of middle class conformism. Will they take off and move to Paris, and if they do will they find happiness there. One of the good bits is that you can really see each side of the couple’s story. (They’re not getting on too well you see). She’s a fantasist – and fancies ‘her man’ as ‘the most interesting person she’s ever met’. This is in consequence of his having said something like that Paris is a place where you can ‘really live’, not like the US suburbs. He’s not too fussed with all this naive enthusiasm of his early twenties and is settling down to try to lead a decent, comfortable middle class life.
Anyway, the marriage is foundering under the unfulfilled fantasies of Kate Winslet’s character and (it has to be admitted) a certain dumb male presumption (not quite the right word) and lack of empahty with and real insight into his wife’s feelings from Leonardo’s character.
Now you migth be thinking that this is a pretty stale old theme – I guess it was done to death at about the time the novel of the film came out (1961). We have our own in the genre like My Brother Jack. But it’s an OK theme.
My problem was that there was no real flicker of this thing inside the couple that might give their decamping for a new life any real interest. I guess their struggles were real enough, and they were struggling, as we all do, with the tension between the reality of our lives and what in our fonder moments we hope for. They let it tear them apart. And yet – and here is a parallel with The Reader – there was never any real insight any real understanding of or engagement with this thing that was driving them.
There was something else that was odd, and yet not all that unusual. This couple had a couple of quite young kids. Well you could have knocked me down with a feather. They may as well have had dolls. The couple lead a pretty seriously claustrophobic relationship, but the kids are never, and I mean never, any trouble – they never get in the way of their fights and all the claustrophobia. Never does their yelling, stamping their feet, holding dinner parties, ever trouble their kids or indeed get interupted by a child who wants to go to the toilet, who has cut a finger, who is jealous of the other, who wants to watch the tele, who wants to have a sleepover, who wants a lolly or hates his food. I guess this is in the book though I’ve not read it. It would have made me angry if I could have been bothered with the story. It certainly made the sensibility from which this kind of faux soul searching from the comfort of one’s middle class life comes even more trivial from my point of view.
Anyway, no doubt others disagree – I’d be interested to hear.
Nicholas, I don’t understand your key criticism, namely that ‘there was no real flicker of this thing inside the couple that might give their decamping for a new life any real interest’, so can’t respond.
On the other hand, I do understand the point about about the children, but don’t agree. The story is about the couple’s relationship, not about family life. The children are important to the story only as abstractions, they need to be out of focus.
Great choice of cartoon, though.
Thx James – I’m not sure how to expand my admittedly already vague comment that you refer to. I guess for the film to have some human interest for me, the idea of decamping needs to have some content. Did they want to decamp – more particularly did she want to decamp to follow some political ideal? No. An aesthetic ideal? No, unless it’s a vague notion of what ‘life is like’ in Paris.
There being no real content to this psychological condition that is tearing the couple apart, it is a study of a kind of psychological vacuum. But even that, it doesn’t seem to me, is given any real content. There are a series of episodes that illustrate gradual decline – in the relationship and the mental health of April.
Now I’m aware this may not satisfy you either. It’s a story and in a sense I’m objecting to it not being another story. I couldn’t get my interest up in it.
On the kids, there’s no problem with their being ‘out of focus’. At least not in principle. As you say, it’s a film about the parents. But kids have a way of refusing to be out of focus. And for those who want them out of focus, if they don’t have nannies and governesses and cooks and cleaners, they have a habit of bringing themselves into focus. This is true at the practical level – kids need a lot of attention just to make sure you don’t get taken away by the authorities for neglect.
And it’s true at the psychological level. If that kind of mayhem is going on in a family kids will pick it up and that will feed back to the parents. The kids won’t sleep, they’ll fret, they’ll find a way to make it their parents problem, they’ll wet beds, muck up at school, you name it. It is inconceivable to me that, in such a family going through such psychological stresses, that this wouldn’t surface in their own psychodramas, which after all is essentially what the film is about.
My own interpretation is that the script was written by people to whom children are essentially invisible. I know people like this. They can’t really relate to children until they’re old enough to engage in ‘interesting’ and ‘sensible’ things.
Given that the subject of the film is the life of a family with young kids, I conclude that the creators of the film and perhaps the book (which I’ve not read so I cannot know) suffer from some fairly comprehensive problem, triviality, adult narcissism, whatever.