*** Official REVOLUTIONARY ROAD Discussion Thread (1 Viewer)

[Robert Crawford]

This thread is now designated the Official Discussion Thread for "Revolutionary Road". Please, post all comments, links to outside reviews, film and box office discussion items to this thread.

All HTF member film reviews of "Revolutionary Road" should be posted to the Official Review Thread.

Thank you for your consideration in this matter.


Crawdaddy

 

[Holadem]

Still processing this one. Watching two neurotics screaming at each other for 2 hours with an excellent audience was certainly a riot. The familiar "is this it?" theme is still worth exploring; A lot of it resonates uncomfortably, as it should. I am not really sure what events at the end have to do with anything, other than underscoring the obvious -- she was done. As entertaining, touching and disturbing as it was to sit thru, the whole affair never quite comes together for me. Perhaps that's the point.

--
H

 

[Michael Reuben]

 

[Holadem]

Kate Winslet is just unstoppable. Nothing lasts forever, but here is hoping that her young yet immensely prolific careers continues just as it has been.

--
H

 

[mattCR]

I've read the book, and it had a very different vibe. I felt as though a fair part into the film, it started t become clear that she was suffering from bipolar disorder.

 

[Jeff_Standley]

Now that would have been great to know and probably would have made an emotional impact on me for the rest of the film.

Also how does the book set up the characters? Is it more in depth than the movies does, because that really bugged me. Mendes usually does a great job at developing characters and I just thought he missed it with this one.

 

[Michael Reuben]

This is a middle class couple living in suburban Connecticut with the husband gainfully employed in a well-paying job. In a post-Roe v. Wade world, there is no plot device that wouldn't have instantly seemed artificial. The characters would have to be entirely different people.

But the ending isn't the only marker that makes the film a 50s-era period piece. April's entire situation -- the one that it would obviously be comforting if it could be dismissed as a function of "bipolar disorder" -- is part and parcel of the 50s world, at least as it's portrayed in RR (the film; I haven't read the novel). I know that there are critics who don't like the film's portrayal of that era, but most of them never lived in it. I did.

Holadem's comparison to Mad Men (which I'm just beginning to watch) is spot on. I may end up, like him, concluding that Mad Men does a better job at capturing the era than RR, but if you know its social norms, and if you pay attention to details like the reactions of the Wheelers' friends when they announce their plans and the differences in the ways Frank and April talk about what's important to them, all of April's shifts make perfect sense. Or at least they did to me.

 

[Jeff_Standley]

I would definitely agree with Holadem as well, MadMen definitely captures what I would imagine the 50's to be very well. The show is great, you should definitely enjoy it. I guess being a bit younger and not growing up in the 50's I need to be hit over the head with the 50's vibe in order for it to stick with me. As you said the movie have set up the 50's just fine, I just missed it when watching.

 

[Swanny]

Saw RR last night and agree with Holadem, lots to process. I get the Bi Polar take but I am thinking maybe April just couldn't handle the fact she never became a successful actress. Overall very good film, Kate Winslet was amazing but RR is no American Beauty.

 

[Patrick Sun]

I chuckled hard at the notion of Frank and April taking a transatlantic boat ride. I was probably the only one in the theater that did so.

I had no idea that Kathy Bates was in this film, so the Titanic reunion of sorts just tickled me a bit at her introduction.

 

[Greg.K]

Not to mention the sex scene in the car.

 

[Matt^Brown]

I just watched RR this weekend and I had a hard time getting through it. I guess a lot of it hit home for me as a guy that has been married for eleven years and is in his early thirties. I think at times we all wonder "if this is as good as it gets?" or question if you are moving in the same direction as your spouse. I felt like they put many of my feelings into words and was really happy I had not watched it in a theater with my wife. I think the conversation after the movie would have been terrible.

I really like a movie that makes me think and evaluate life.

 

[Michael Reuben]

Regarding the parallels between Mad Men and Revolutionary Road, here's an interesting item from an article about Mad Men in the Aug. 9, 2009 "Arts and Leisure" section of the NYT:

John Cheever’s short stories about midcentury suburbia were a major inspiration, but not Richard Yates’s 1961 novel, “Revolutionary Road,” to which the series is often compared.
Mr. Weiner had never heard of Yates when he wrote the “Mad Men” pilot in 2000. “ ‘Revolutionary Road’ was given to me three years after I wrote the pilot,” he said. He says if he had read the book before, he wouldn’t have had the nerve to write the show: “Yates was there. This is what he was writing about.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/arts/television/09kapl.html?pagewanted=2

 

[Julian Julio]

I watched the film last night, and did find April to be ultimately hollow- in spite of her beautiful ideal - that she needed to go to Paris, and to 'really live'. Before I express why I say this, let me say that I did love this side of her: it's beautiful and daring - needing to really LIVE above all else , but... where is the REST of her??? I wouldn’t call her –nor Frank a 'neurotic' person; I would leave to the likes of Mrs. Givings (choosing to see neuroticism as a lack of relation to life, rather than being 'well-adjusted to a (Sick) society... Nicely encapsulated by her husband turning up his hearing aid at the end.....) Mrs Giving's son, however, seemed to be very alive -or at least insightful, and -thus in my view, - much 'saner' than her, I am sure the writer (of the book – although I haven’t read that,) and director also were kind of intending this! The son was telling 'them' a possible version of the truth in the last scene with him, but it was not clear that it was what April and Frank REALLY felt deep down. Indeed, he seemed the true revolutionary, despite having had Electric Shock 'Therapy'. His view of life seemed ‘dark’, but it had more to it than April’s, which was almost ‘crystalline’, too pure; it was her muse, but it didn’t seem to have any relation to other human beings. Although (e.g. in a friend or partner) I need a woman to have this need to live above all else, to have the necessity of adventure, (soul-adventure, if you like); one also needs a sense of reality: as their friend told them, 'Europe is not going anywhere'; -they could have gone 2-3 years later... And I'm sure that 'Paris' wouldn't have transformed her missing parts! It's not where you go, or even what you do, but it's your attitude and approach to life wherever you are that is the essential, key element to living a life that is worth living! Paris was surely not without all the frustrating human problems either, that can help cause a sense of alienation. Maybe they could/should have gone there for a long holiday, with an open-mind, just to see... On the other hand, I find Frank -though not without his shortcomings, - is much more 'there' as a HUMAN being... He had that adventurous-necessity, which was admittedly - almost buried and forgotten, but resurrectable, when she mentioned it to him. However, he had other sides, the pragmatic sides, and a human heart (the way he cried when they sang ‘happy birthday’ to him,) and was much more there and, so, more likeable and relatable-to as a complete human-being. Whereas she was ultimately cold and couldn't and didn't seem to want to contact HIM- as he was (a real-and-likeable-enough mixture of different sides to a human-being). Moreover, she never REALLY discussed it together with him realistically and fully, with their hearts and minds and souls... On the contrary, she was internally-'locked' into 'Paris' as the be-all-and-end-all, and had an absurdly 'romantic'/unrealistic perception of him - which was HER 'stuff' as 'someone who JUST needed adventure' - and I think that's what he was suffering towards the end of the film. Indeed, when she said 'I love you Frank' earlier on- it was only when he was more into this 'idea of Paris'. She was loving him because he was then resonating with her 'Ideal'. In all these ways, ultimately, she seemed to be a very disturbed and disturbing character: She was so 'alone' in her pure and perfect ideal, I don't think any of us could really contact HER... Perhaps this film (which always held my interest), as a work-of-art, is asking the question what it is to be really and truly sane in life (the 50’s or 2011).