Two nights ago Jen and I went to see “Revolutionary Road”. Originally I had no interest in seeing this film. I made fun of it over and over again, complaining that the trailers gave absolutely no information as to what the movie was about. But then I watched part of it over the shoulder (with no sound) of someone on the MetroNorth train to New Haven the weekend I went home for my birthday and I was intrigued. It was the bar scene and Kate Winslet’s bouncy ponytail looked so appealing, bouncing around on her back and shoulders as she sexily danced with her neighbor in the red light. And low and behold, Kate Winslet and her bouncy ponytail won the Golden Globe* for best actress and then the commercials started to reveal more dialogue/plot line. Ooo, I just had to see this film!
I had high hopes that this film would turn out to be a sleeper hit, a hidden gem. My hopes were dashed. I could not really tell what the point of this movie was except maybe to make women look like miserable nags or loonies, or maybe to illustrate the point that everyone was miserable in the marriages in the 1950s as evidenced by Kathy Bates’ husband turning down his hearing aid to effectively tune her out at the movie’s end. I guess it was a meditation on the psychoses of the era: the not so distant memories of the war, the nuclear familes, the suburbanization, the keeping up with the Joneses, the sameness of the jauntily suit-and-hatted men stepping off the commuter trains pouring into Grand Central from Connecticut and New Jersey to file off to their jobs in marketing and advertising, and the lunch time highballs. The relationship between Leonardo DiCaprio, as Frank Wheeler, and Winslet, as April, didn’t seem all that different than my grandparents’ unhappy marriages. Their marriages ended just as tragically, in the particular way that tragedy struck those relationships that approached what should have been their golden hour in the mid-50s.
Winslet’s April was so sad. She was sad in the way that a woman who was bound by her times is sad. Unable to reasonably leave her husband, most likely unable to be gainfully employed in anything other than the secretarial sector, if that, unable to access birth control, and unable to terminate a pregnancy without risking death herself. She was trapped. And when she tried to express her unhappiness and raised her voice about the lack of love in her married life, she was made to look like a fucking madwoman. A woman can only be one of two things: a nag or a crazy. Wait, she can be a bitch too. A bitch, a nag, or a crazy. Lots of possibilities here! Lots of ‘em!!! Also, when her character went as far as to “be bad” and she ended up doing it to her married neighbor in his car, it was made to seem as an act of revenge for her husband’s philandering and that it was a physically uncomfortable and regrettable act that made her feel ashamed afterward. In fact, whenever there was a sex scene in the film Winslet’s character did not seem especially emotionally present or sexually satisfied.
There was one point toward the end of the film that I had no idea where the plot was going and it made me so nervous. I kept wringing my hands and, turning to Jen, whispered, “What is going to happen?” I was pretty sure either Leo or Kate was going to kill the other –or- Kate was going to kill herself –or- Kate was going to run away with the kids who were almost never in the scene, anyway. For a stay-at-home 1950s housewife, Kate’s character did very little mothering. In any event, the ending of Revolutionary Road was not all together unexpected but not entirely predictable either. This movie was not very interesting, yet still pretty sad.
Luckily I made it home in time to watch Lost!
*What are the Golden Globes all about? It is the award show warm up to the award show season and the prizes are decided upon by the Hollywood foreign press…what does that even mean? Who is the Hollywood foreign press anyway? Like, the actual foreign press?
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