If there’s any justice to be found in the results of this year’s Oscars – and I’m aware that the Oscars aren’t generally about justice – it’s that it’s revealed itself to be a place where one is rarely awarded for doing bad work twice, unless your name is George Lucas.
When the nominations for this year’s awards were being debated before Christmas, few people seriously doubted that Sam Mendes’ film Revolutionary Road would be a contender. Mendes was the man behind American Beauty, after all – exactly the sort of high-minded mix of liberal morality and vicarious gratification that the Academy rewards, and it walked away with five statuettes that year, including best film, director and actor.
With Revolutionary Road, Mendes had delivered a reprise of sorts – a tale of desperation and tragedy set in America’s suburbs, albeit transposed from the present-day to the ’50s. Critics grumbled that it was too much of a reprise, and a dour retread at that, and the film ended up with just three nominations. When the night was over, one of the film’s stars had won an Oscar – Mendes’ own wife, Kate Winslet, albeit for a different film – but Mendes’ film went home empty-handed.
Unseen, Revolutionary Road looked like a winner, but just days after its release it had provoked a chorus of criticism on top of reviews that were unenthusiastic when they weren’t unimpressed. Author Ron Rosenbaum summed up the general perception of the film’s weakness in an article that called it “past its sell-by date in its vinegary sourness, but utterly lacking in originality – as dull, conformist, and soulless as its supposed subject.”
Rosenbaum was moved to write a defense of the suburbs, as were many of the film’s critics, myself included – I penned a comments piece for my former employer heartily defending the suburbs that were regarded by most people as the film’s primary target – the same suburbs that I’d escaped as soon as I left school. Other writers took issue with the implication that the ’50s were to blame for the tragedy that overcame Frank and Anne, the film’s protagonists, played by Winslet and her Titanic co-star, Leonard Di Caprio.
Bashing the ’50s is an overused dramatic trope that does the double duty of getting a shot in at social conservatives, who are perceived – with some small accuracy – of wanting to return to the era’s homogeneity and mores, a classic example of both sides buying into a myth.
A sustained session with the decade’s popular art, from Douglas Sirk’s melodramas to John Cheever’s short stories to the plays of Tennessee Williams, reveals a decade humming with anxiety and social tension. And why not – mere years after the Great Depression and the horrors of the Second World War, it’s easy to see a society suffering from post-traumatic stress, staggering between unconvincing denial and bouts of survivor’s guilt. A return to the ’50s would prove a trial for anyone who imagines it as a social oasis, and would deprive its critics of their unfairly easy target.
Where Mendes’ film really failed, however, was its assumption that we would unquestioningly sympathize with Frank and April’s presumed tragedy. Critics such as Kirk Honeycutt of the Hollywood Reporter described them as “individuals born with an innate sense of superiority but absolutely no ambition.” The film’s great crisis – curious for many people, verging on obscene at a time when economic havoc threatens both home and livelihood – is that they’ve woken up one day with a burning urge to reject routine and economic stability and their home in the suburbs in favour of the bohemian life they once craved.
Never mind that Frank actually seems happier cooking up advertising copy in his office cubicle than writing the novel April insists he has in him. Things go really bad, however, when he comes to the dawning realization of his own capabilities, and discovers what Honeycutt calls “a stubbornness and selfishness in April worse even than his own,” just before the dramatic and emotional climax of Revolutionary Road: a self-induced and ultimately fatal abortion that April performs on herself – an act, we’re meant to understand, inspired by her desperation.
After many years as a movie critic, I’ve come to the conclusion that, no matter the intentions of a director or writer, an audience’s native understanding of humanity will always trump dogma, or a default position that defends itself as sophisticated moral ambiguity. From Alfie to Juno, there’s never been a way to show abortion as an amenable plot point, never mind a sympathetic decision. Mendes can’t do it, and the wrenching emotional aftermath ripples back through the previous two hours, overwhelming choices of period and setting, revealing Frank and April as characters pitilessly, even cruelly, set up to fail, a fate ultimately shared by the film itself.
Rick McGinnis was an entertainment writer for The Metro until he was unceremoniously replaced by an unpaid intern in early February
