Revolutionary Road: 119 minutes. Rated: M. Director: Sam Mendes. Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslett, Michael Shannon, Kathy Bates
The dog wakes me at 5am, and as for sleep, that's the last of it.
It's not his fault. No doubt a cat has wandered in to the yard, and is taunting him, sitting just beyond the fence, beyond his reach. He's curious and protective; who could begrudge him a bit of yapping?
By the time I've got up, walked outside and shooed the disturbance (it was a cat, licking its paws, indifferent to the din), I'm awake, so I decide to start work. I switch on the home PC and take a seat.
'Bloody suburbs!' I muse, as I begin to type.
I've recently seen Revolutionary Road, a film in which the (1950s American) suburban locale provides an eerie backdrop.
Winslett and DiCaprio portray April and Frank Wheeler, a young couple with marriage problems. They are indeed both fine performances, that capture the nuances of a marriage empty of love, strained by responsibility and the expectations of society, and sickly with the conviction that they are too exceptional for life in the suburbs.
It's the latter that most aroused my attention. The apparent mundaneness of life in the suburbs seems ever ripe for satirical exploitation. It's a theme that always interests me, because I was raised in the 'burbs, and still live there.
Not coincidentally, Revolutionary Road comes from the director of another fable about the decimation of the American dream that, on its release in 1999, stuck sharp in my then late adolescent mind. I had become disillusioned with what I perceived as the hollowness of life in suburbia. American Beauty, in which suburbia is a purgatory characterised by empty obsession with stuff and niceness, affected me.
In Revolutionary Road, never mind purgatory: suburbia is hell, barbed with tedious career obligations and the demands of parenthood, awash with too-bright light that leaves the skin looking transluscent, and populated with overly-cheerful, deluded demons such as the Wheelers' real estate agent Helen (Baker), for whom a pretty couple in a pretty home is a picture of heaven.
The Wheelers want to flee. The film revolves around their elated plans to sell up, pack their children, and move to Paris, leaving dullness and tedium in their wake. Their acquaintances respond with envy, contempt or clumsily feigned approval. The Wheelers thrill to all three reactions.
They do find one sympathetic confidant, in Helen's son