Revolutionary Road is a really good film. My only critique is similar to American Beauty, which I really liked as a kid, but with maturity comes off a little judgmental. I feel great sympathy for most of the characters in both of Mendes’ movies, but also a little bit like the films want me to feel some blame towards the people most caught up in the suburban value prison. Kathy Bates’s character for instance, or Annette Bening’s character in American Beauty. It appealed to my teenage rebellious nature, to identify with Wes Bentley or Michael Shannon’s rejection of the suburban values and feel sorry for the pitiful people caught up in them, but it’s a little condescending too and skirts with the melodramatic push that can prevent true universal sympathy.
For instance, we are lead to believe that Michael Shannon’s and Wes Bentley’s characters are completely right in both films. But in a way you could even read it so that it is exactly that illusion of countercultural “freedom” that dooms Winslet’s character or (keeps Spacey’s character in American Beauty from healing his relationships, instead reverting to buying a sports car and smoking weed in the garage). Winslet seems to buy Shannon’s narrative of hopelessness that leads to her self destruction but we are left feeling like he was right: she was trapped by her family and a society that won’t let her get a safe abortion and her husband who was a coward. She had to cut out the chain in her belly, knowing it was probably going to kill her.
(And yes, she knew it was the end. The whole sequence is full of goodbyes to her family. Why did she call 911? Because she didn’t actually want to die; she wanted to be free, but believed it was hopeless. And so it was.)
But it didn’t have to be. Her husband knew Paris was probably a pipe dream and that when it came down to it he wasn’t the artist she wanted him to be and he liked their life if only she had liked it too. Not that he was right or anyone was right, but just that the best tragedies help us feel empathy for all. I worry that some people saw this as an advertisement for pro choice abortion laws instead of really feeling the double bind of all moral conflict; that there aren’t simple right vs. wrong good vs. evil choices, but a morally complex world where we can never know for sure what the right decision may be, what our life might have been like if we had made a different choice, and we often learn too late what the consequence of any choice may be. It’s that feeling of the universal that the movie gets close to, even if one can get caught up in feeling like she was a victim with no choices, and missing the universal sympathy or high tragic art. It certainly does hit some powerful emotional chords though, even if it may lean too heavy on pity over empathy to achieve them. The actors are fantastic indeed. Definitely the antidote to the melodramatic mirage of the Titanic, haha. Probably what would have happened if Leo’s character had survived. haha.
She was nice to him in the end because she was able to see him as a separate person without the romantic projections, without the delusional love and expectations and the hate and disappointment it inevitably brings when we realize the person we love is a whole different person than our fantasy projection. She finally asked about his work and saw that he liked it and that he was a good man. She just didn’t want that life. But didn’t know how to be free without some violent act of separation. The truth is no one is ever completely free and only by empathizing and negotiating with each other can we achieve relative harmony.
