"Revolutionary Road" out on DVD today

Fans of Kate, Leo, suburban derangement, soul-searching, or seekers of proof that I don't hate every movie: The book is still better, but I stand by my claim that last year's Sam Mendes effort was probably the best adaptation that could have happened. And it's not as depressing as the trend wrought by this week's other book "adaptation" on DVD, "He's Just Not That Into You," a film I was happy to skip and plan to keep skipping.

If you like REVOLUTIONARY ROAD, you might like THE STORY OF A MARRIAGE which is now out in paperback. I can't find any evidence of a forthcoming adaptation, but I assume we'll see a Weinstein Co. Best Picture nominee in 3 to 5 years. My casting suggestions are a bit spoilery, so I will put them in the comments.

Filmbook: "Revolutionary Road" (2008)

Hey look! We're getting near the end of the Hype Train!* Ahem.

Why don't we cut to the chase? (Without any spoilers, that is.) "Revolutionary Road," the Sam Mendes-directed film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, is not a perfect movie. Nor is it my favorite movie of the year. But I really liked it, and I think it's about the best possible adaptation Yates could have gotten.

I really liked how much of the original text was incorporated into the dialogue and design of the film, even as I acknowledge that Roger Deakins' assured and confident cinematography couldn't quite make up for the absence of Yates' descriptions. While screenwriter Justin Haythe cut my favorite scene from the book (it involves Maureen, and that's all I will say!) out of the film, it preserves almost everything else except shifting the opening scene a bit. DiCaprio, while not my first choice for the role, surprised me with his take on Frank, but I'll never be able to forget Kate Winslet as April Wheeler.

(In fact, it surprises me that the buzz on her performance in another movie I saw last weekend, "The Reader," is much more positive. I can't do "The Reader" as a Filmbook entry properly, because I read the novel ages ago and have since forgotten about it, but I will say that the movie is like a book that starts slowly, gets really good in the middle, and then trails off at the end such that you wonder why you persevered. And while I like Winslet in everything, this is one of those showy Look She Got Ugly performances.)

Maybe it's just because I liked the book so much, but I was willing to overlook some of the subtlety that was lost in adaptation. Some of the issues treated here have been better handled by episodes of "Mad Men," but the AMC show has 13 episodes to develop, and "Revolutionary Road" didn't. Nor was I very much reminded of "American Beauty," Mendes' debut to which this film has been endlessly compared because they're both set in the American suburbs. In fact, quite the opposite -- like the book, this film addresses some very modern issues of self-actualization and the quest for happiness, which I think will help it age better than "Beauty." Frank and April's problems aren't created by (and solved through escape from) the '50s; it's much too deep for that.

To be fair, a few things I didn't like: Mendes and Deakins uses a particular shot of DiCaprio a few times that does him no favors in the close-up. (There's also a very obvious moment in Grand Central Station that felt a little lazy.) In the supporting-performance roundup, the women (Zoe Kazan as Maureen was my favorite) easily trump the men: David Harbour as the neighbor next door projects an air of blankness, while Michael Shannon, an actor I've seen and liked on stage, is ill served by the clichéd scenes that surround him. (Exception to this rule: Dylan Baker as Frank Wheeler's do-nothing coworker -- delicious.) And the final scene, while it is from the book, just feels a little too pat.

Overall, I think Yates would be happy -- particularly with the scene at the bar, which is really the climax of the film -- and that makes me happy. I'd even wager a movie this honest and cutting could not have been made in his own time.

Filmbook Verdict: Read the book, then see the movie.

*The caboose, clearly, is the Academy Awards... or the nomination announcements if for some reason this movie doesn't get nominated for anything. I highly doubt that.

Revolutionary Road Hype Train: Blame Kate Winslet

I can stop any time I want to, but for now I point you to the SPOILERY New York Times article SPOILER POSSIBLE: "Kate! Leo! Gloom! Doom! Can It Work?" which credits star Winslet with nudging the project forward, including getting her former costar and her husband (director Sam Mendes) onboard:

Though he would have hated the term, Yates was a writer’s writer, or even a writer’s writer’s writer. He was extravagantly admired by his peers and by many critics; but popular success, which he cared about more than he let on, maddeningly eluded him. He was dogged by bad luck — “Revolutionary Road,” his first novel and also his best, was a finalist for the 1962 National Book Award but lost to “The Moviegoer” by Walker Percy — and bad timing. At a time when postmodernism and meta-fiction were starting to become fashionable, he clung to the realist tradition of his models Fitzgerald and Flaubert... [He] knew his way around Hollywood sufficiently to be skeptical about the movie prospects of “Revolutionary Road.” Right after the book came out, Sam Goldwyn Jr. expressed interest. But Yates wrote later: “Cooler heads in his organization decided that the moviegoing public ‘is not ready for a story of such unrelieved tragedy.’ ... Sic transit the hell Gloria.”

I have always liked Kate Winslet and I really liked her last major adaptation project, "Little Children." Of course, none of this is consoling me in the knowledge that I will be nowhere near New York or L.A. when the film opens there Dec. 25, so I probably won't be seeing this until 2009. But then, we can't let the Hype Train just run out of steam.

"Revolutionary Road": The hype train stops here

Not sure where this Jay557 is getting all these scenes from the forthcoming Sam Mendes adaptation of "Revolutionary Road," but (no surprise) they are making me even more excited to catch this movie when it comes out Dec. 26.

This is my favorite clip of the most recent ones: Frank and April, the dissatisfied suburban couple, decide to let their neighbors and best friends in on their plan to change their lives, a change that really moves the plot forward.

Screenings are already taking place in Manhattan; maybe my invite from Paramount and Dreamworks got lost in the mail. Thanks to Superfast Reader for pointing these out.

Earlier cars on the hype train: Official "Revolutionary Road" trailer, and my review of the Richard Yates novel that started it all.

Desperation Street

"The happy implication was that they alone, the four of them, were painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture."

You may have guessed it from the times I quoted this book last week, but I'm just going to open with it now: Richard Yates' REVOLUTIONARY ROAD is one of the best books I've read this year. It's been on my to-read list forever and I actually returned it unread to the library earlier this year because I couldn't renew it, but I am so glad I went back to read it.

Frank and April Wheeler are a pair of what appear to be cookie-cuter 1950s suburbanites -- educated, 2 kids, he works and she stays at home (although she has worked in the past). Neither of them are particularly happy: He works for a company he applied to because it had once rejected his father, trying to do as little as possible and missing his old post-war bohemian life when he was an erudite, handsome college man.

April keenly senses that Frank is unhappy -- they were living in the city when she got pregnant, "seven years too soon," which forced his hand in a sense -- but doesn't really know how to help. She feels like she doesn't truly love her kids and misses the days when she once dreamed of being in actress. In fact, the book opens with April performing in a play through the community theatre which the Wheelers and their friends the Campbells started, which just embarrasses them all. When April hits upon a plan that would allow them to leave their house on Revolutionary Road, she thinks it'll solve everything about their life:

"You could have called my bluff in a minute...but you didn't. You were too good and young and scared; you played right along with it, and that's how the whole thing started. That's how we both got committed to this enormous delusion -- because that's what it is, an enormous, obscene delusion -- this idea that people have to resign from real life and 'settle down' when they have families. It's the great sentimental lie of the suburbs, and I've been making you subscribe to it all this time. I've been making you live by it! My God, I've even gone as far as to work up this completely corny, soap-opera picture of myself... Now do you see what you have to forgive me for? And why we have to get out of here and over to Europe as fast as we possibly can?"

But Frank proves curiously opposed to the idea, even as outwardly he conforms to his wife's plans. The author also discusses how the neighbors are affected by the Wheelers' plan, from their best friends whom they secretly can't stand to the nosy empty nester next door.

There's something that feels very epic about Yates' book. Despite the specificity he gives the characters, Frank and April -- perhaps with the passage of time between this book's publication and now -- feel very much like a 50s Everycouple in the way we have come to see that decade. e suffers the slings and arrows of no longer being in the war by drinking too much; she could be sexually repressed and feels like an inadequate mother. (If you've seen "Mad Men," you're probably thinking of the Drapers, and the comparison is apt.)

But since REVOLUTIONARY ROAD comes from that era, it's a more nuanced take on the fifties than later portrayals which hammer their points home. For example, the nosy empty-nester is in a long-standing disagreement with her husband because she likes to work and he doesn't:

"And [Mrs. Givings] had never been able to explain or even to understand that what she loved was not the job -- it could have been any job -- or even the independence it gave her (though of course that was important for a woman constantly veering toward the brink of divorce). Deep down, what she'd loved and needed was the work itself."

By the same token, even minor characters get wonderfully sketched out moments, as in this one, where Frank is watching a woman on the street with whom he has just had a confrontation of sorts:

"[H]e crept back to the front door, pushed aside the dusty net curtain that covered its glass and peered down, just in time for a rear view of Norma out on the curb, wagging her handbag for a taxi. Her back was stiff with anger and there was something extremely pathetic about her suitcase, which looked expensive and brand-new. She had probably spent days buying it and weeks shopping for the things that would ride in its silken depths today -- new bathing suits, slacks, sun lotion, a new camera -- all the fussy, careful apparatus of a girlish good time. With the odd whimpering sounds still bubbling up from his rib cage he felt an incongruous wave of tenderness go out to her, as she climbed into the cab and rolled away."

As you can tell, this book gave me a feeling I haven't had for a long while where I felt compelled to copy down passage after passage because they were so exquisitely rendered. I heartily recommend this book, and suggest you read it now before the forthcoming film adaptation, starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio ("Titanic" reunion!), makes quick work of its subtlety.

"I still had this idea that there was a whole world of marvelous golden people somewhere, as far ahead of me as the seniors at Rye when I was in sixth grade; people who knew everything instinctively, who made their lives work out the way they wanted without even trying, who never had to make the best of a bad job because it never occurred to them to do anything less than perfectly the first time. Sort of heroic super-people, all of them beautiful and witty and calm and kind, and I always imagined that when I did find them I'd suddenly know that I belonged among them, that I was one of them, that I'd been meant to be one of them all along, and everything in the meantime had been a mistake; and they'd know it too. I'd be like the ugly duckling among the swans... It's a thing I wouldn't wish on anybody. It's the most stupid, ruinous kind of self-deception there is, and it gets you into nothing but trouble."

--Richard Yates, REVOLUTIONARY ROAD

"It had been easy to decide in favor of love on Bethune Street, in favor of walking proud and naked on the grass rug of an apartment that caught the morning sun among its makeshift chairs, its French travel posters and its bookcase made of packing-crate slats -- an apartment where half the fun of having an affair was that it was just like being married, and where later, after a trip to City Hall and back, after a ceremonial collecting of the other two keys from the other two men, half the fun of being married was that it was just like having an affair. She'd decided in favor of that, all right. And why not? Wasn't it the first love of any kind she'd ever known? Even on the level of practical advantage it must have held an undeniable appeal: it freed her from the gritty round of disappointment she would otherwise have faced as an only mildly talented, mildly enthusiastic graduate of dramatic school; it let her languish attractively through a part-time office job ('just until my husband finds the kind of work he really wants to do') while saving her best energies for animated discussions of books and pictures and the shortcomings of other people's personalities, for trying new ways of fixing her hair and new kinds of inexpensive clothes ('Do you really like the sandals, or are they too Villagey?') and for hours of unhurried dalliance deep in their double bed. But even in those days she'd held herself poised for immediate flight; she had always been ready to take off the minute she happened to feel like it ('Don't talk to me that way, Frank, or I'm leaving. I mean it') or the minute anything went wrong."

--Richard Yates, REVOLUTIONARY ROAD