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Written by Midnight Butterfly
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Sunday, 01 March 2009 21:04 |
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Page 1 of 3 
Kate Winslet gets laid onscreen more than any other actress this side of Jenna Jameson. In fact, not being the big Jane Austen guy, I’m not entirely sure I’ve ever seen Winslet in a movie where she didn’t get down and get sweaty at some point during the film. Now, being Kate Winslet such trysts are usually the expression of some deep-down suburban angst, some profound, all-consuming need that will conversely be expressed by tears later on sometime in the movie. Still, sometimes I can’t help but wonder, is it like a rider in her contract or something? “Nah, I can’t do it unless I’m getting my brains fucked out.”
And it’s cool for us leches in the audience who would pay just to see Kate knocking the boots, because you can go to one of her movies and everybody thinks you’re an intellectual – not a pervert. Sweet. The fact that she’s also a lights-out actress who never seems to have a bad performance is just gravy. In Revolutionary Road, there’s a fair amount of gravy. Winslet has never been more luminescent, that palpable sensuality has never been more apparent than in Revolutionary Road. More than any actress since Debra Winger, sex maps out the psychic landscape of Winslet’s characters. Sex is where and how we find out who they are, what makes them tick and what they are going to do. It’s not simply the act. Winslet’s April Wheeler carries this sensuality around with her. It exudes from her. It’s what makes her different from other women, what makes her a star in suburbia. Other men look at her and fantasize about her, other women look at her and feel insecure. For April herself it is an ember that is billowed into grand passion. She needs fulfillment -- sex as ambition and later, horribly, as ambition thwarted. This raging fire inside of her is what drives her, what tortures her, what pushes her to realize that simple, romantic love is not enough.
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| A similar curse is borne by her husband, Frank Wheeler (Leonardo DiCaprio). He’s a guy who other women want and other men root for to succeed. They look up to him because of his hot wife, because he seems like a golden child, because he seems to validate all of their tiny lives. Frank’s special curse is discovering that he buys into this too. He doesn’t want much more than two kids, a house, and a hot wife. His dreams really are just that small and that if his dreams are that small than so must be the man dreaming them. It’s the kind of harrowing self-revelation that all of us hope we will never have and Wheeler suffers for it dearly. His pathetic attempts at staving it off, his tawdry little affairs, his conceits, the tiny buffers he sets up for his ego are straws before the hurricane -- his wife. He never stands a chance. They never stand a chance.
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It is a relief that Revolutionary Road takes place in the ‘Fifties. Were it a contemporary story it might be too much to bear, too close to home. It is almost unbearable as is. Frank and April’s anguish feels so real, so raw, so American, that your life doesn’t have to look like theirs on the outside for it to feel like all too familiar territory. Chances are, in fact, your life doesn’t look like theirs because theirs is what’s really going on underneath the Leave It to Beaver set. The casting of DiCaprio and Winslet acts as a type of shorthand. When April and Frank go on about how they’re special we get it because we have an emotional connection to the truth of this statement that we bring with us to the theater. Winslet and DiCaprio are two glamorous and popular stars. So are Frank and April in their little corner of the suburbs. That their bloated sense of self-importance is a house of tissue paper makes almost too much sense. How many times does anyone look around and judge what they see around them? How often does that judgment infer that we are somehow superior? How often is that inference thrown back in our faces when we see the same judgment coiling in the eyes turned upon us?
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| Sam Mendes depends a great deal on the shortcut of the glamour of his stars. If we don’t bring an affinity for the characters with us we won’t get it from the movie. From the moment we meet them we’re on intimate terms with the worst sides of their personalities. They’re beautiful but not particularly likeable. It’s a testament to the honesty in the work of DiCaprio and Winslet that we care for Frank and April at all. Usually, one thinks of characters not being real because they don’t have any warts. Here that’s almost all they have. The film’s major flaw is that it is hard to see what there is to fall in love with from either Frank or April. They are quite hopelessly immature and self-involved as a couple and as individuals. We get a brief taste of what brought Frank and April together in the first place when they are briefly intoxicated with April’s idea of going to Paris, but because we know it’s a lie – it’s not going to happen – we don’t believe it. It’s almost like their main attraction to each other was the other one’s matching conceit: “Yeah, you’re gorgeous enough for me to marry.” Unfortunately, that’s a real indictment of American culture. We actually do have that phenomenon so it makes sense.
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Last Updated ( Friday, 06 March 2009 15:40 )
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...I'm drunk. Both sources loved the book is what I meant to say, though they had wildly differing opinions on the
