Oh, no. Really? Again? Ten minutes into “Revolutionary Road,” director Sam Mendes delivers his nightmare vision of starched gray men suited up for corporate life sentences as they parade in suffering slo-mo through a sepulchral Grand Central Terminal. Repression. Conformity. Let’s drink a glass of lunch and toast our Formica souls. It’s the ’50s.
Can they really have been that miserable? Frank and April Wheeler (Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet) are a 1955 Connecticut couple (he commutes to a white-collar job in the city, she’s a mom) who, deciding they need “something different,” hatch a plan to move to Paris with no particular prospects. “I tell you – people are alive there,” says Frank, who visited France as a serviceman. “Not like here. I want to feel things. Really feel them. How’s that for an ambition?”
Frank plans to take time off to find himself (the actor playing him is 34, which seems a bit late to have no clue what might interest you) while April supports both of them with secretarial work. As they chatter about their plans, though, a grim sense starts to seep through the film that they”ll never have Paris, and that this is their tragedy.
Though self-location is an admirable goal, especially in Paris, how closed-minded are we to think of the 1950s as the acme of unhappiness? The fifties were insufferable, stultifying, unbearable – compared to what?
A man Frank’s age would have spent his entire adolescence in the Great Depression, and watched his maturity coincide with WWII. He might have served in that war himself, or Korea, or both. He would have friends who returned home from war with serious injuries. He would know men who had been violently killed before their 25th birthdays. A glance at any daily newspaper would remind him that the Soviets had the power to destroy everything he knows at the touch of a button. He might be the first man in his family to hold a job outside of a factory or a farm.
Wearing a corporate uniform (though those ’50s suits look pretty sharp now) to an office job that paid well must have seemed like a vast improvement from wearing a military uniform and having a job that paid badly in which you might get shot. And living in a bedroom community where everyone held approximately the same views (so unlike, say, Larchmont or Bethesda today) would have topped living in a barracks.
The Wheelers have a nice house, a nice family, friends and access to New York City. They don’t have artistic fulfillment (April failed at acting and Frank, though he has an artist’s yearnings, hasn’t even picked a medium), but if they aren’t geniuses in New York they’re not going to suddenly become talented in Paris. “It is possible that Parisians aren’t the only ones capable of leading interesting lives,” Frank says, a line that infuriates April. But how much of a dullard do you have to be to think otherwise?
This film’s contempt for the vast majority of American lives is nearly absolute. Just a couple of generations ago, the idea that we must all find our jobs delightful or spiritually engaging would have seemed laughable. Not everyone, our grandparents would have gently reminded us, can act on Broadway.
Besides, who says that even a job in sales can’t have its pleasures? It’s typical of the ’50s suburban tale, with its sneering at corporations, that it shows a complete lack of curiosity about what goes on in them. Even Frank doesn’t seem to know what his job is: “For God’s sake,” he says, “I don’t know what the Knox 500 does, do you?” Frank doesn’t think “it’s possible to discover anything on the 18th floor of the Knox Building.”
Maybe he’ll bump into Don Draper and learn how it’s done. In a scene in season one of “Mad Men,” which is set in early-’60s New York and has the same look as “Revolutionary Road,” ad creator Draper sells Kodak on his idea for naming a slide projector a “carousel” while flashing family snapshots creeping back in time through his own life. As Don revisits his various joys and losses and lies, the moment borders on the sublime.
The moral of “Revolutionary Road,” the stand-up-and-jeer part, is this line: “Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.” To assume people you don’t know and don’t try to understand are empty and hopeless, though, is a characteristic of a shallow, smug, incurious mind. It’s Sam Mendes who is punching a time card here.