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Pros: Richard Yates' novel, Roger Deakin's photography, Kristi Zea's design, Michael Shannon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet.

Cons: Mendes/ Hathe's failure finding inspired images, connective dramatic  tissue equalling Yates' magnificent summary narratives. 

The Bottom Line: If Richard Yates' novel were not so great, REVOLUTIONARY ROAD's failings would not be so regrettable.  Still, a classic cautionary tale, as relevant today as it was in the 1950's.

In his 1961 first novel, Revolutionary Road, leading the way for writers like Ray Carver, Andre Dubus and others, Richard Yates set the pattern for the rest of his career.  The central characters of his novel, Frank and April Wheeler, in the minds of many readers, became the tragic model for what didn't work in a 1950's American middle class marriage. Here, as a master of somber poetic realism, Yates showed his command of summary narrative, which leads seamlessly, time after time, into brilliantly dramatic scenes which break one's heart. To be moved by a Yates' story is to have been there.

Take, for instance, the opening chapter of Revolutionary Road -- an extended description of a suburban Connecticut little theater production of Robert E. Sherwood's 1935 Broadway hit, The Petrified Forest: April Wheeler, a 30 year-old matron, abused in her youth, once an aspiring actress, is playing Gabrielle, a roadhouse waitress with romantic ambitions of going to Paris. Her vitality has attracted a flickering hope in Alan Squier, a depressed, failed poet who has come to this lonely place in the Arizona desert to die.  

Yates alternates the slow collapse of April Wheeler's performance -- sabotaged by her careless fellow players' miscues -- with the daydream her husband Frank is building out in the audience. April's theatrical triumph will become occasion, he imagines, for a desperately needed evening of love and hope in the Wheeler marriage. By the time, Squier has persuaded escaped Gangster Duke Mantee to shoot him so Gabrielle may collect his insurance policy to fulfill her dream, the production has become a shambles, but Frank is -

". . . sitting spellbound in pride and then rising to join a thunderous ovation as the curtain fell; himself glowing and disheveled, pushing his way through jubilant backstage crowds to claim [April's] first tearful kiss ("Was it really good, darling? Was it really good?"); and then the two of them, stopping for a drink in the admiring company of Shep and Milly Campbell, holding hands under the table while they talked it all out. Nowhere in these plans had he foreseen the weight and shock of reality; nothing had warned him that he might be overwhelmed by the swaying, shining vision of a girl he hadn't seen in years, a girl whose every glance and gesture could make his throat fill up with longing ("Wouldn't you like to be loved by me?"), and that then before his very eyes she would dissolve and change into the graceless, suffering creature whose existence he tried every day of his life to deny but whom he knew as well and as painfully as he knew himself, a gaunt constricted woman whose red eyes flashed reproach, whose false smile in the curtain call was as homely as his own sore feet, his own damp climbing underwear and his own sour smell." 

There follow scenes in the dressing room backstage, and then inside the Wheelers' car going home, finally rising to a screaming horror of marital domestic agony by the roadside, in which April just wants to forget the humiliation of thespian failure Yates has shown us, but Frank desires to bolster his happy fantasy as a way to regain their lost sense of promise and communion. 

REVOLUTIONARY ROAD, Director Sam Mendes' new movie adaptation, highly touted for Kate Winslet's award winning performance as April, will strike married or divorced viewers as either a secret paradigm of their lives or, as one blog critic put it, "like spending two hours with a couple of losers!" Richard Yates, author of this Madame Bovary-like story, might have agreed with both opinions.

 *****

Faithfully scripted from Yates' novel by Justin Haythe, competently directed by Sam Mendes (Winslet's husband), impeccably cast, gorgeously photographed by Roger Deakins, and designed by Kristi Zea, REVOLUTIONARY ROAD is betrayed by the very strengths of Yates' novel. His marvelous summary narrative needs time to accumulate its dramatic strength, and time is a threat to a movie maker's nerve. And so, Mendes and Haythe cut the whole dramatization of the disastrous Petrified Forest amateur production -- a metaphor for the psychodrama of the Wheeler marriage -- down to a meaningless snippet of denouement and the curtain call, losing in the bargain a detail of later importance, that neighbor Shep Campbell is a moonstruck stagehand for the production. Hence, when Frank Wheeler rises to go back stage, cajoles his emotionally shattered wife in her dressing room, and eventually almost belts her beside their parked car, the audience has to substitute intellectual surmises for the raw emotion Yates created in one of the finest opening chapters in any American novel.

 The film then proceeds in an admirably succinct and impressionistic way to show us how the unconventional Wheelers met, fell in love, got with child, married, fulfilled their domestic roles, lapsed into a suburban social pattern, and sublimated their ambitions to marriage in the accepted fashion of 1950's America. They buy a neat white house on a hillock rising above one of the early postwar housing developments, at the end of a cul-de-sac known as Revolutionary Road. 

Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) takes the train every morning with tens of thousands of others into New York City [a striking montage] where he works for the same business machine company that his father had for over 30 years.

 April (Kate Winslet) keeps their house spotless, minds the children, but grows bored and frustrated over her unfulfilled ambitions. In time, we gather, as the marriage begins to go south, they have another child, a son to provide company for their little girl, "to bring them all together." But after April's little theater failure -- each thinking to realize the other's plan for salvation -- they begin to entertain desperate schemes "to get out of the rat race," perhaps going to Paris, where Frank had a great time in the Army at the end of World War II.

REVOLUTIONARY ROAD is about how "the other directed" Wheelers (to use David Riesman's much discussed phrase of the time) underestimate the trap they are in, and the price that must be paid for either of them to escape.

*****

No one who did not live through America in the 1950's can quite imagine now what it was like. Most Americans, unquestioningly conventional in their fairy tale Christianity, after the deprivations of the Depression and the War, were only too happy to have a job, a new car, supermarkets, their own house, indoor plumbing, and one of the new TV sets. The white middle class largely ignored the fact that segregation by race and religion was a fitfully challenged norm.  Though most failed to realize it, they were living on the loot of the World, only beginning to see foreign products, thanks to the Marshall Plan, and still deeply suspicious of them amid the greatest self-contained domestic market in history.

Men, if they did not benefit from the GI Bill's of WWII and the Korean Emergency, tended to work where their fathers had, on the farm or at the local mill.  

Women married as soon as they could after high school. They were profoundly ignorant about and frightened by sex (as often were the men). No legal abortions and no convenient female contraceptives existed. Many girls were "knocked up" under their virginal white gowns at their weddings, and divorce was frowned upon. Aside from nursing and teaching, women tended not to go on to higher education.

 Respectable women did not smoke on the street.  They stayed home, had children, and were mostly subservient to their husbands. Like today, Republicans -- though not quite so proudly and crazily right wing -- persuaded a majority of Americans that things such as unions and health insurance, which might give them some bulwark against economic disaster or illness, were un-American.  

In small towns or amid the new suburbs, "other directed people" like the Wheelers were often politely regarded at best as a little peculiar  . . . or at worst . . . as  Communists!  

*****  

The chorus for this almost Greek Tragedy are neighbors Shep and Milly Campbell (David Harbour and Kathryn Hahn), who literally look down upon the Wheelers from their home further up the hill on Revolutionary Road. Very conventional, they are attracted to their friends' style and modernity but could never bestir themselves to invest heavily in the Wheelers' contempt for normality.

 The catalysts, the enablers, for the tragedy, counterparts of the well-off Chisholms in Sherwood's The Petrified Forest, are Howard and Helen Givings (Richard Easton and Kathy Bates), a retired couple, who deal in the new "land office business" of postwar real estate. Both are examples of American "boosterism," of the time, but Kathy Bates' makes Helen particularly and memorably obnoxious, flattering the Wheelers for their gentility and adventuresomeness, always on the make to gain some advantage for herself and her husband. It is they who sell the Wheelers their "little dream house," half way up Revolutionary Road. 

And if the the Givings represent the Chisholm's symbolically in The Petrified Forest metaphor, who is the deus ex machina, Public Enemy Number One -- Duke Mantee (Humphrey Bogart's part in the movie which set his persona)? Why it's Helen Givings' son, John (Michael Shannon).

Helen inveigles April to lay out one of her lovely tables of Sunday heur d'ourves so they can have John "socialize" amongst a solid young family, a family with children . . . of the better kind. John, you see, is one of those "certifiable nuts" that people in the 1950's used to fear but also laugh at. He was once thought to be a mathematical genius, but he didn't get along with people, and the Givings (though they don't say so) had him committed to the local mental institution, where he has undergone 37 shock treatments, and is now thought improved enough to be allowed brief leave from his confinement. When they usher him into the Wheelers' front room, Helen Givings might as well be a gangster sidekick in Sherwood's play, announcing: "This is Duke Mantee, folks. He's the world-famous killer and he's hungry."

 John Givings loves April's snacks, and after insisting on giving the company several rapid-fire shots of his embittered wisdom, he picks up on Frank Wheeler's careless, cynically humorous remark that they plan to escape "the hopeless emptiness of everything in this country." Yes, yes, responds John, these Wheelers are his kind of people, and he presses them to give him details of their half-formed scheme to go to Paris to live. For John Givings, the Wheelers represent the opposite of his family and their social set, which is everything he loathes. He invests himself in their dream, and what had been bravely amorphous becomes a commitment for Frank and April in the intensity of John Givings' bipolar zeal. He thinks he has found intellectual integrity in America, at last.  

The fuses have been lit.

 *****  

I wish REVOLUTIONARY ROAD were as inspired as Richard Yates' novel, but it's not. Michael Shannon's performance is probably the best thing in the picture, but the characters of Frank and April are so constricted that  hard work by Leonardo DeCaprio and Kate Winslet cannot make us care for them deeply, as we do in the novel. And thus, Michael Shannon's John Givings overbalances the plot while, at the same time, suggesting what the picture might have been with better writing and editing.

And there is a lazy flatness in the secondary characters, other than the Givings. Zoe Kazan's Maureen Grube, Frank's brief fling from the typing pool, is a more poignant, sympathetic character in the book. The neighboring  Campbells never quite impress us as self-satisfied mirror images of the Wheelers, nor do we have the novel's foreshadowing of the part Shep Campbell will play in the end, and April, in her isolation, has to convey her despair without much help from the scenarist. Director Mendes told an interviewer that he cut 20 minutes out of REVOLUTIONARY ROAD, which as in the case of dropping the recreation of April's performance in The Petrified Forest, may not have been entirely good for the picture.

Early on, R&B songs by The Ink Spots, The Orioles, and the Ravens, which Thomas Newman uses to augment his otherwise simple, effective, progressive score, while being of the 1950's, weigh down the film, call attention to themselves, seem to mock the characters, and are out of place in the Wheelers' lily white suburban environment.

 Finally, as some critics have suggested, Yates' novel Revolutionary Road, like The Petrified Forest, may be seen to have a humorous side, cynical and bitter, but more than just comic relief. Only one justly remarked-upon ironic closing shot, other than John Givings' Swiftian zingers, makes it into the finished version of REVOLUTIONARY ROAD.

For an example of what has been lost: in the novel, an insidious factor which undermines Frank's idealistic resolve to escape is that though he hates his job, he likes his work mates. And so, they are identifiable characters with whom he regularly lunches, and in whom he increasingly confides, part of a griping conspiracy against Knox Business Machines: "The Company."  Jack Ordway, the ringleader of the group, provides considerable humor but also influence on the plot because he always "wants to go to the good place" which is close enough to the office so that they may have several martinis before returning to work. Gradually, Frank Wheeler becomes Jack Ordway's ally. In the movie, Ordway (Dylan Baker) is a distrustful, obvious alchoholic, but little different from the other employees.  

Too bad.

 *****

Richard Yates was a kind of F. Fitzgerald of the 1960's, writing novels and story volumes about doomed post-WWII idealists colliding with reality. Yates' first books were hailed, but his later efforts received mixed reviews, and were seldom read.

 Kept at his trade through illness, nervous breakdowns, and drink by editors like Sam Lawrence at Delacorte and Esquire's Gordon Lish [legendary writing coach, fired from an early teaching position in my high school district for tardiness, an irony Yates would have relished], Yates also wrote speeches for Bobby Kennedy, and taught creative writing at the University of Iowa.

 Despite several prestigious Book of the Month Selections, nothing Yates ever wrote sold more than 12,000 copies -- not too shabby, mind, in a time when a sale of 5,000 justified a publisher's advance. And although obviously cinematic, until now, none of his writings has found its way to the screen. He did write an unproduced screenplay based on William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness for John Frankenheimer, but his one realized work for the screen, John Guillermin's THE BRIDGE AT REMAGEN (1969), drawn on his experience in the War, became a mishmash mixed with that of other writers, and he found his Hollywood experience damaging, both professionally and personally, as Fitzgerald had.

 When the hard drinking, heavy smoking Yates died of emphysema in 1992, at the age of 66, none of his books remained in print. 
 

Yates wrote at least three masterpieces: Revolutionary Road, Easter Parade (clearly recognized seminal novels of America in the second half of the 20th Century), and Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, a superb collection of his early short stories. I would add Disturbing the Peace to this list, though considered a failure, because it's the most autobiographical and frightening of his works.  The novel involves a schizoid man (Yates?) with a drinking problem, prescribed increasing amounts of early day psychotropic medications by doctors after he moves from the East Coast to Hollywood.

 If REVOLUTIONARY ROAD will get you out to read the above books, the picture will be worth the fourth star I'm going to give it.

 In the last month of his life, Richard Yates was working against deadline to finish his final (as yet unpublished) novel, Uncertain Times, based on his experience with Bobby Kennedy. He was in a skid row room (the kind he preferred to live and work in), surrounded by dead cockroaches he killed on  work breaks, breathing oxygen for his emphysema from a huge canister, still smoking, when he decided to phone some friends. He told them that the night before he had gotten drunk, and had read aloud to himself the first chapter of Revolutionary Road, "tears streaming down my face."

If you read Revolutionary Road, you'll know why. Even seeing Sam Mendes' REVOLUTIONARY ROAD may give you an inkling. And looking out over the next couple of years, given the societal dementia we've been in, the lives of the Wheelers may become more immediate to us.

 *****  

For Wayne the K., and Scott Adams