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Revolutionary Road

Crit

OK, here's the deal: this is a story about people whose entire belief system is based on the premise that they are extraordinary, though condemned to dwell temporarily among the ordinary. Naturally, their lives, their love, and their world (not to mention their quixotic plan to move to Paris in order to Change Everything) fall apart when is becomes clear that, oops--they're not special after all, except in their ability to recognize how empty and hopeless their existence is, which, let's face it, really doesn't have much practical value, living-your-life-wise.

But because that's so freakin' depressing, what we do is, we get Movie Stars, Titanic Movie Stars, shall we say, to play the couple, and then the audience will know that the TMS are extraordinary, notwithstanding the tragic ordinariness of the characters they're playing. And thus we will give a shit about a couple whose whole deal is that there's nothing much there to care about. We will, in short, be able to have our existential gâteau and manger it too.

Or maybe not.

But enough about the film. Indulge me in a bit of bitching about a recent New Yorker story by James Wood about the Richard Yates novel whence the film derives. It's actually an interesting think piece about the novel, and I recommend it to anyone who has already read the novel or seen the film. However, it treats Yates's work--which has an enthusiastic cult following, but is obscure enough that it was until the announcement of the film project completely unknown, despite years of study of literature and particularly 20th-century American literature, to at least one person I happen to be--as if it were Anna Karenina. In other words, as a work that is so much a part of the Zeitgeist that its cataclysmic climactic event is well known even to people who haven't read it.

Now I don't think I'd have liked the film much better if I'd hadn't known from the beginning that . . . no, I'm not going to tell. Anyway, I wouldn't go so far as to say Wood spoiled the film for me. But he sure didn't do any good, and I'm guessing I'm not the only New Yorker reader who waded into the piece trusting and unsuspecting only to turn slackjawed and furious halfway in.