“Revolutionary Road” – A Cinematographic Reflection
I loved Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in James Cameron’s blockbuster “Titanic,” and knew their inherent electricity together would fuel their latest collaboration in “Revolutionary Road,” directed by Kate’s husband, Sam Mendes.
The film is set in the mid-1950s when people were still smoking cigarettes in their business offices, and is based on a novel (published in 1961) by Richard Yates. We follow two characters, Frank Wheeler and his wife, April, as their life together takes unexpected turns.
Kate could be the emotional doppelganger of poet and novelist Sylvia Plath, who was so distraught over having children and being forced to fit the “mother and housewife” mold, that her last act of defiance was to place her head on a gas oven. on Kate and Frank have two children together, but there are hints throughout the film that April would rather have devoted her talents to acting. There is clearly little or no support for that. Still, the 1950s family structure of a working father, two boisterous kids, and the role of model housewife doesn’t fit into April’s scheme of things. So when Frank agrees to her carefully considered plan to move the family to Paris, where she will take over as secretary while Frank discovers her true talents, April is ecstatic. There is a bright new feeling in their relationship when neighbors and co-workers are informed of her plan to move to Paris. The “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” part of her life seems to be far behind her. Now, like a pair of giggly teenagers, they are delighted to be moving in the same direction.
But the Frank who is willing to leave the company where his father worked before him for decades (and whom no one at the firm seems to remember) is now irresistible as an asset to his bosses who make him an offer he can’t refuse, to stay. still. Of course, April, who is the voice of reason through all of this, can’t fathom that her grand plan has fallen apart, even after buying her plane tickets and starting to pack. On top of all that, she’s pregnant with no desire to have a third full-term child, at the Revolutionay Road home that she’s already said goodbye to.
In an interview published in Ploughshares in 1972, author Richard Yates said: “During the 1950s there was a general urge for conformity throughout the country, by no means only in the suburbs: a kind of blind and desperate grasping for safety in at any cost, as politically exemplified by the Eisenhower administration and Joe McCarthy’s witch hunts. Still, many Americans were deeply disturbed by it all, felt it was an outright betrayal of our best and bravest revolutionary spirit, And that was the spirit that I tried to embody in the character of April Wheeler. I was referring to the title to suggest that the revolutionary road of 1776 had come to something very close to a dead end in the 1950s.”
Many of us tend to think of the ’50s as the good old days, but not in terms of a woman’s right to choose whether or not to have a family. And yet, how is the 21st century different now? People still feel that they should hold on to what they have and not take any chances to change their circumstances. Most pregnant women, as shown in today’s media, choose to have the baby. Juno, in a “breakup” movie, chooses to have the baby and give it away. Back in the “real world”, a humanitarian doctor named George Tiller is assassinated for a supposed “right to life” (if that’s not an irony, then what is?)
When asked about the subject of his book, Yates told the interviewer, “If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inevitably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.” If we humans could walk a mile in our neighbor’s shoes (as my father once liked to say), we’d be amazed at how similar we really are in wanting our lives to be comfortable yet remarkable.
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