No announcements found.No announcements found.No announcements found.No announcements found.“Death creates an economy that makes life precious. One of the ways of naming that preciousness is friendship.”
Stanley Hauerwas
Stanley Hauerwas
Longing for Surprises - Revolutionary Road
Simon Smart
English band ‘Radiohead’s’ song from 1997, No Surprises, describes a modern existence of quiet desperation:
| A heart that's full up like a landfill A job that slowly kills you Bruises that won't heal |
| The song explores a life that takes place in ‘a pretty house’ with a
‘pretty garden’ but, as the chorus repeats with haunting, escalating
angst, there are ‘no alarms and no surprises.’ At its dramatic
conclusion, the song descends into chaotic, discordant noise containing
the desperate refrain ‘let me out of here.’ It’s a portrait that neatly
reflects the shape of Revolutionary Road the film adaptation of Richard Yates’ novel from 1961, starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio. Winslet has already been acclaimed for her performance, and rightly so, but DiCaprio is at least her equal in depicting with raw and jolting honesty this modern tragedy of a relationship being wrenched apart. Set in Connecticut in the 1950s Revolutionary Road delivers a story of life in the suburbs for middle class America, where grey-suited male commuters pour into trains to travel to the city for uninspiring and repetitive work, leaving their stay-at-home and increasingly desperate wives to tend to domestic duties. For director Sam Mendes (married to Winslet) this is familiar territory after his highly successful American Beauty explored the thin veneer of respectability overlaying the anomie of suburban existence in 1990s Middle America. |
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Our early encounter with Frank and April Wheeler is by way of flashback to a couple enthralled by each other’s uniqueness and creative spirit. Together they feel special. ‘I think you are the most interesting person I’ve ever met,’ she tells him. They plan a life of adventure, travel, and varied experience. ‘I want to feel things, really feel them?’ says Frank. After marrying they settle into life in suburbs determined to be different to those around them, but soon find themselves sucked into a vortex of responsibility and crippling, suffocating routine.
Mendes evokes the 1950s atmosphere skilfully—the formal dress, daytime martinis and endless smoking combined with décor that these days is retro cool, but in this context is relentlessly plain. Post-war optimism and burgeoning technology deliver the hopes and disappointments of modern consumerism.
| There are echoes here of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique and the now
classic image of a 1950s housewife isolated, bored and diminished,
turning to increasingly damaging ways of breaking the monotony.
Surrounding the Wheelers are couples who lead bland lives in a
monoculture of stifling conformity. It is only petty gossip that adds
any spice to an otherwise humdrum existence. ‘Look at us,’ cries an
ever-more agitated April. ‘We’re just like everyone else … We’ve bought
into the same ridiculous delusion … that you have to resign from life.’
A scene depicting the couple walking silently down a long, sterile
corridor serves as a telling symbol of where they are headed. It’s a longing to re-capture the sense of vitality—of being fully awake, that sparks a dream for April that they sell the house, Frank quit his job and move the family to Paris. ‘People are alive there, not like here’ Frank had once told her.’ As the idea germinates in her head she seeks to make it reality with hurried determination. Frank takes some convincing but once on board, life takes on a different hue for both of them. It is at this point in the story when the dream is alive that they are at their best together—animated, excited and in love again. |
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Of course ‘Paris’ is a metaphor here. It could have been anywhere that provided escape, risk, and freedom. For a time it looked like the romantic journey might become reality. But circumstances conspire against them. Reality strikes a blow. April begins to implode.
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