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January 8-14, 2009
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Roads not taken
by Michael Phillips
Body-slamming blockbuster
by Michael Phillips
 Roads not taken
by Michael Phillips
Sam Mendes, the director of Revolutionary Road, injects a few milligrams of hope into his film version of the 1961 Richard Yates novel, an excoriating portrait of a mid-1950s marriage built on sticks, straw and delusion. It is a harsh, merciless book. Yet you wouldn’t call it solemn, and along with a redemptive grace note or two, the film — which is extremely well acted — lays it on pretty thickly. However sterling the craftsmanship, the film adaptation inflates the meaning and buffs the atmospheric surfaces of Yates’ story, rather than digging into its guts.
Yet its rewards are many. For one, Kate Winslet. It’s silly to say so, especially because everyone else is saying so, but she really is an amazing actress, able to break your heart and chill your blood in the same instant.
There’s a shot early in Revolutionary Road that captures what Winslet can achieve non-verbally in five seconds’ screen time. Her character, April Wheeler, has just finished the opening-night performance of a community theater production of The Petrified Forest.
The show, alas, is a stinker, and as April changes clothes in the dressing room waiting for her husband, Frank, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, she nervously plunks herself down at the makeup mirror. As he approaches, her face is a fleeting picture of hope and gratitude: My man will fix this. He will comfort me. Then out of Frank’s mouth comes a cutting, joking comment about how lousy the show was, and the look on Winslet’s face reflects exactly how ashes taste.
A few minutes later, Winslet and DiCaprio enact the first of their flaying arguments in Revolutionary Road. At night, just off the highway, they go at it. It’s the sort of fight, edging toward physical violence, from which no marriage can emerge whole. While Winslet’s skill and bravery in this scene is no surprise, DiCaprio’s a formidable partner. This is his finest performance. He has been effective before, but because DiCaprio is fearless about playing Frank the way April sees him, “a pathetic, self-deluded little boy,” all the usual audience-identification issues are off the table. The character’s layers of promise, meanness, selfishness and yearning make for a rich acting challenge, and DiCaprio — whose face is that of the eternally boyish outsider — rises to it.
The lasting achievement of Yates’ novel has nothing to do with stultifying suburbia or facile raps on Eisenhower-era conformity. The reason the novel still sings is its specificity and the way it bores into its central couple, playing no favorites. The characters suffer from a serious case of exceptionalism. If only Frank could leave his soul-crushing, relatively lucrative job at a business machine firm and “find himself.” If only April could reconnect with her bohemian heart’s desire by picking up and moving to Paris, and support her husband. If only they hadn’t had children so young.
This is Mendes’ fourth feature, after American Beauty (suburban anomie, already dated), Road to Perdition and Jarhead. He has yet to develop an interesting camera sense; so far — and this is no crime — he has focused on telling the story and maximizing the theatrical sparks provided by his actors. (He is married to Winslet.) Revolutionary Road finds Mendes in a pictorially handsome collaboration with cinematographer Roger Deakins, who makes the homey but slightly spare domestic interiors, along with the Manhattan office and restaurant scenes, glow with false promise. It’s intelligent work.
Maybe “studious” is the better word. The final moment re-creates the last couple of lines of Yates’ novel, faithfully. Yet by hitting such moments with a bludgeon rather than a rapier, this honorable and often vivid interpretation of a fine, sad, ice-cold masterwork just misses that extra dimension, the complexity of feeling Mendes brings to his best stage work. Those who experienced his radical reinterpretation of Cabaret (as long as they didn’t see Teri Hatcher in the touring edition) knew they were in the presence of a major director. On film, so far, he’s not quite major and not quite minor. But when DiCaprio and Winslet unleash their character’s demons, Revolutionary Road loses its tight, controlled sense of composition and air of solemnity and, in human terms, matters.
—MCT
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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 Body-slamming blockbuster
by Michael Phillips
Written by Robert Siegel, former editor of The Onion, The Wrestler spends 105 minutes grappling at the edge of camp, cheap laughs and clichés. Yet the way it’s handled by director Darren Aronofsky and especially by Mickey Rourke — who really should get an Oscar for his portrayal of Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a steroid-addled sweetie in tights — it stays honest and keeps on fighting.
The Wrestler works for the same reason Rachel Getting Married works. The way they’re acted, shot, edited and scored, both films deploy a loose, rough-hewn documentary style to great dramatic advantage. The corn isn’t hyped. The performances click without going for the jugular.
It is a pleasure to see Rourke finesse this amalgamation of The Champ, Marty, Rocky and a dozen other movies to his supreme advantage. Aronofsky directs so that we notice, and appreciate, his discretion, even when he’s showing Rourke pulling staple-gun staples out of his hide after a particularly rough bout in the ring. For several minutes we do not see Rourke’s face. First he’s sitting in the corner of a grade-school classroom, his back to the camera. This is how low The Ram has fallen since his stardom in the ‘80s: He’s reduced to wrestling in a makeshift arena set up in a grade school and waiting in his “dressing room” for a percentage of the gate.
For much of The Wrestler the camera follows Randy from behind, like an eager autograph hound, as he approaches each new combat arena, or as he pounds on the door of his mobile home court manager’s office. The others on this B-minus wrestling circuit have names such as The Funky Samoan or Lex Lethal. The Ram is well-liked by all. His life is one of routines and routine disappointments along with diversions. He wears a cumbersome hearing aid, hangs out with his stripper pal Cassidy (Marisa Tomei) and, for the purposes of the plot, tries to reconnect with his estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood).
The Ram has heart problems, but The Wrestler does not. It’s sincere, violent, sentimental, predictable and extremely effective. Rourke’s a remarkable physical specimen every which way, and he takes some amazing punishment, amazingly choreographed, in the wrestling scenes. He takes punishment in the more hackneyed off-ring scenes with his daughter, too, but Wood and Rourke treat the material like gold, and damned if their scenes don’t work. One of the best bits has Randy working the deli counter at his supermarket, and the way he banters with the customers (“Whatcha havin’, good-lookin’?” Randy asks one shlubby middle-age fellow), you sense a born performer in action.
Any number of directors and actors could’ve messed up The Wrestler — oversold its line of goods. Not Aronofsky and Rourke. They know, in their bones, this script is shameless. The trick is framing it as the right kind of shamelessness. Bruce Springsteen knows it, too, and his end-credits song, no less on the nose than the rest of this savvy, pungent little winner, pays tribute to all the lonely entertainers out there, working the crowds if there are crowds to be worked.
—MCT
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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