Revolutionary Road, round 3.

"Let's put it plain," begins Andrew Tracy in Reverse Shot: "in any sane world, Revolutionary Road would be laughed off as a joyless embarrassment before we moved on to more pressing business. Yet while this latest Oscar-baiting turkey will doubtlessly find its ultimate fate in the critical memory hole, the reason for the season demands that we speak of it as if it deserved serious consideration; as if this is a case of 'flaws' in an otherwise worthy whole. Make no mistake, though: this is folly of a grand order, though any potential glee one might take in skewering it is deflated by the ruthlessly enervating experience of sitting through it."

Updated through 12/27.

Nick Schager, writing in Slant, finds the film to be "a dispiriting bust as both an adaptation and (to a slightly lesser degree) as a standalone film, betraying [Richard] Yates's book in fundamental ways and turning what once stood as a textured parable about the American Dream into a shrill, shallow series of Important Speeches and theatrical histrionics."

"Revolutionary Road is only partially Sirkian," writes the Siren. "Charles Peguy said the only tragedy was not to be a saint; in Revolutionary Road the tragedy is to discover that you are not an artist. Like Sirk, in David Thomson's phrase, 'social decorum smothers love and lovers;' unlike Sirk, in this movie an individual doesn't stand a chance.

"While Yates's depiction of suburban life is nightmarish enough to exceed the worst fears of Jane Jacobs's devotees, Revolutionary Road is far more than a complacent takedown of the 'burbs," argues Adelle Waldman in the New Republic. "It is in fact less an anti-suburban novel than a novel about people who blame their unhappiness on the suburbs."

Peter Knegt has a good long talk with Mendes for indieWIRE.

Earlier: Rounds 1 and 2.

Updates: Jeffrey M Anderson, writing for Cinematical, finds the film to be "both relentlessly grim and nearly pointless."

"Being that it's at once an embarrassing failure and an unignorable success, it's a bit of a shock that Sam Mendes's Revolutionary Road has thus far been received with fewer vitriolic open letters and impassioned defenses than shrugs of measured praise," writes Karina Longworth in the SpoutBlog. "Certainly the best work Mendes has ever produced for the screen, Revolutionary Road works (on the level that it does work) as a showcase for performances: big stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet are probably at the top of their game, a star-making performance is registered in less than a handful of scenes from Michael Shannon, and, in the ultimate nagging old lady role, Kathy Bates reminds us why she is the greatest living nagging old lady in all of cinema."

Updates, 12/24: "Revolutionary Road isn't a great movie - it lacks the full, soul-crushing force of the novel - but what works in it works so well, and is so tricky to pull off, that you can't help but admire it," writes Scott Foundas in the Voice. "By no means an easy candidate for adaptation, Yates dwells in the shadow area between people's conscious and subconscious selves, between the faces they show to the world (and even their spouses) and the ones they see when they look in the bedroom mirror at night. To fully grasp Revolutionary Road is to understand that two people can be at their most alone when they are together - and Mendes, whose American Beauty rendered a similar investigation of suburban anomie as a gallery of over-the-top comic grotesques, willingly goes there. Where the earlier movie was easy to brush off, this one gets under your skin: It is to Mendes's great credit that Revolutionary Road will likely lead to some tense moments between many a young couple on their drive home from the cinema."

"It's a textbook example of a well-crafted movie, beautifully shot, impeccably acted, and structured like an elegant three-act play," writes Dana Stevens in Slate. "So why does the movie feel as pleasantly deadening as the midcentury Connecticut suburb where it takes place?... Maybe this movie's curious emptiness has to do precisely with the actors' appeal, their matinee-scale beauty and charisma."

"Where Road should evoke the slow burn disintegration of romantic idealism," writes Michael Joshua Rowin in the L Magazine, "it instead plays as a series of Actor's Studio sessions in 'lives of quiet desperation' histrionics (then why so loud?), losing detail (a barely-there subplot involving a neighbor smitten with April) and compensating with bombast (Thomas Newman's overbearing score) - compared to, say, Mad Men the action contains little room for devastating subtleties. Some punches land - April's rejection of her husband as 'just some silly boy who made me laugh at a party' - but more frequently they whiff at both universality and resonance, leaving Road as hollow as the Wheelers."

Update, 12/25: "This is a movie about two people in pain; the last thing they need is for Mendes to turn his cool camera on them." Stephanie Zacharek in Salon: "But that's all Mendes knows how to do. He's a clinical director, and whatever feeling he puts into a movie is measured out in careful quarter-teaspoon increments. Some people would call that restraint, but I always get the feeling that Mendes, whose background is in the theater, believes deep in his heart that movies are the lesser art form."

"Justin Haythe's unpardonably distilled screenplay 'adaptation' manages to whittle away all that was interesting within Yates's book," writes Ed Champion. "It is, like the 1974 film adaptation of The Great Gatsby, a dull and literal winnowing of a literary masterpiece.... It's a pity that this film never dares to trust its audience and speed up its pace through natural beats and a meticulous attention to human behavior. If it had, it might have come close to understanding the welcome, thunderous sea of silence at the heart of Yates's novel."

Alonso Duralde at MSNBC: "The characters played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet spend the film screaming about the other's flaws, and I unfortunately found myself agreeing with both of them - both the protagonists are thoroughly mediocre, uninteresting people, and I never figured out why I was supposed to care about the fate of either of them."

"Both director and cast keep the familiar journey intense, but after capturing the death of love in those opening moments, the rest of the film too often feels like a study in dissection," writes Keith Phipps at the AV Club.

Michael Ordoña talks with Michael Shannon for the Los Angeles Times.

Updates, 12/26: "Revolutionary Road is the kind of great novel that Hollywood tends to botch, because much of it takes place inside the heads of its characters, and because the Wheelers aren't especially likeable and because pessimism without obvious redemption is a tough sell," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "It's hard to think of many directors who could do it justice: Nicholas Ray, who in films like On Dangerous Ground and In a Lonely Place conveys an intimate acquaintance with twinned despair and self-loathing, might have made it work, and perhaps Paul Thomas Anderson."

"[T]he movie keeps see-sawing between strict fidelity to the book's delusion-busting and Mendes's innate desire to pose his actors as startlingly lifelike mannequins in a Macy's display window, or find the most beautiful possible way of shooting brute ugliness," writes Howard Hampton for Artforum. "When the time comes to stage April's big hemorrhage scene, every shaky footfall is microscopically choreographed, the blood looks to have been measured out with a sterilized eyedropper, and the symbolic stain on her dress is bathed in radiant picture-window sunlight."

Update, 12/27: "Her grandfather was Oscar-winning director Elia Kazan (On the Waterfront), and her parents are screenwriter-directors Nicholas Kazan (Reversal of Fortune) and Robin Swicord (Little Women, Memoirs of a Geisha)." For the Los Angeles Times, Susan King talks with Zoe Kazan, who plays "saucy young secretary Maureen Grube."

Posted by dwhudson at December 23, 2008 2:53 AM