As I sat in a suburban movie theatre last night, with hundreds of other suburban husbands and wives, watching a movie screening about the tragedy and "hopeless emptiness" that is married life in the suburbs I felt queasy. Of course, this was a history lesson, since it's about married suburban life circa 1955. The movie, Revolutionary Road, stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Frank Wheeler and Kate Winslet as his wife April, in a grim and depressing film so morose that you will begin to wish, as I did, that Leo had stayed submerged under the icy North Atlantic waves when he went down
with the Titanic. After appearing together in that movie, Leo and Kate should be forbidden from ever, ever trying to duplicate that magic.
In this film, it takes only three minutes, before the opening credits, for Leo and Kate to meet at a party and fall in love. Then, pooof, they are married and with children (who conveniently disappear for long, long segments of the movie) and living in the suburbs. He's commuting to New York, in his hat and suit, along with hordes of other men in grey flannels, and she's wearing perky dresses as she vacuums and cooks. It's 1955: Welcome to the Age of Marital Misery.
The rest of the movie is an exercise in marriage-based torture: his on her and her on him. It's painful to watch, but I was distracted by the near physical perfection of the two stars. Leo has a few random facial scars--under his chin, near his eye--and I spent minutes pondering their origins. Also, Kate is a siren, a gorgeous star who grabs attention in every scene. But. What's up with her tri-color hair? She has black roots, it's buttery yellow at the top, and carrot orangey at the bottom.
As far as I'm concerned, it's a minor character, John Givings, played by Michael Shannon, who steals the entire damn movie. He plays the insane son of the Wheeler's real estate broker, and he's the only one who tells the vicious, horrible truth about this life of "hopeless emptiness." He is riveting.
This movie is not about Boomers--it's about our parents' generation--and the only Boomer actress in sight is Kathy Bates (born in 1948) who plays Mrs. Givings, the real estate lady who sold the doomed Wheeler's their Connecticut dream house. She is, apparently, the only working wife in this entire suburban universe, but April doesn't get the message. To April, the only way to salvage her boring, dreary life would be to move to Paris--so her husband, Frank, can find himself and so that she can be the one who gets a job and goes to work every day.
The whole story would have been a lot less tragic if she'd only realized that she could have found a job in New York too.
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