“Hopeless emptiness. Now you’ve said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.” – John Givings.
So says John Givings, a psychiatric outpatient mesmerisingly played by Michael Shannon in Sam Mendes’ searing adapatation of Richard Yates’ ‘Revolutionary Road’. He’s speaking to a young Connecticut couple, Frank and April Wheeler, who have revealed to him that the ‘hopeless emptiness’ of a material suburban life, is what they believe to be the root of their marital strife. Shannon’s two brief but indelible scenes are the best moments of a very good film. His character’s unflinching honesty tears away the cloaks of self-deception that Frank and April Wheeler have been using to shield themselves from the pain of their disintegrating relationship.
Played masterfully by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, the Wheeler’s are a couple who are searching for reasons to explain their ennui and discontent, and latch onto an escape to Paris as the panacea for this melancholy. But when the plan falls apart, neither has the self-awareness to realise that it would have only been a band-aid on the gaping wound that is April Wheeler’s depression and the monotonous boredom of Frank Wheeler’s work life. The film feels like watching a replay of a plane crash; you know a violent impact is coming but you can’t look away.
April in particular is a fascinating study in unchecked depression and suburban self-loathing. Her fanciful notions of a vivacious new life in Paris ignore the essence of her struggle; that wherever she goes, there she is. Winslet buries herself into a role that is both piteous and sympathetic.
It’s a dark film, but gripping in its slow-burn voyeuristic window into the Wheeler’s ‘idyllic’ life; a life that is envied and respected by their friends and neighbours, until that is, the bubbling anger of latent, repressed desires erupts in a brutal moment of domestic disquiet.
Surprisingly snubbed by the Oscars (though I have yet to compare it to ‘Frost / Nixon’, ‘Milk’, or ‘The Reader’), I thought it was Oscar-calibre in its moody, evocative cinematography by the great Roger Deakins, and its assured, subtly symbolic direction by Mendes. Though as mentioned, Michael Shannon is the stand-out; his character, like Shakespeare’s Fool, gives words to the audience’s dismay and disgust. His final line to April is one of the harshest statement’s from one character to another I have ever seen.