Sam Mendes
Revolutionary Road

If your girlfriend insists that you get married, show her this film. Leo and Kate, together again more than ten years after the sinking of the Titanic, find themselves facing other abysses, no less serious and terminal.

I caught up on this Sam Mendes film on Netflix these days, which was talked about a lot back in the day, if only because of the big-name couple in the cast. Watching it today, Revolutionary Road seems almost more ancient, could be twenty or thirty years old. Because it truly immerses itself well in conservative America of 1955, constructing an event horizon where the small daily dramas are represented by conversations more heated than others, news given late to the spouse, a boring job, artistic ambitions, whether to have another child or not, the move to Paris, and many other cues that inevitably become controversies.

In some parts, it reminded me of Mad Men, to which it is a little subsequent. The risk of boredom is largely averted by a rigorous narrative construction (sometimes even too geometric), which guides the viewer hand in hand through the disputes and the hopeless void of middle-class life. It does so with an all too literary script, which sometimes clashes for the overly precise and deliberate accuracy in depicting every single emotional passage, but this is also the merit that makes the film memorable in its own way (and first the book by Yates, of course): linguistic realism is not what matters in such a story, but the ability to stylize existential aporias without a solution.

The psychiatrically troubled son of friends (Michael Shannon), with no filter, is the oracle, the perfect though easy narrative device to throw all the Wheeler couple’s shortcomings in their faces. A very literary and slightly cinematic device, but nevertheless delightful, a masochistic pleasure you might experience in front of a screenplay that seems written with razor-blade precision.

There are many films too faithful to the literary form, but here the actors' skill manages to turn the bas-reliefs into full-rounded figures. Kate Winslet, if I'm not mistaken, won the same year for The Reader but is formidable here as well, DiCaprio, perhaps still a bit raw in his performances, does everything not to look bad and succeeds. But beyond the central duo, there are many characters who, even with just a few minutes, manage to leave a mark on the screen, for their cruelty, for the hypocrisy with which they change opinion, for the brazenness in telling the truth in a world that constantly shuns it. Behind the reassuring appearances, there is a worm that gnaws at each of them. Even the most trusted friend will not hesitate to walk over your corpse.

In this anesthetized world, trying to wriggle out of the toxic embrace of bourgeois life (with the futile project of starting anew in Paris) means entering a maze of suffering, all made of conversations with friends and neighbors, colleagues. Imagine if this project fails...

And in the face of tragedies, real and not just verbal, this world punishes you further, inflicts, as for a damnatio memoriae: the gravest penalty for having tried to dismantle it is collective oblivion; even the dearest friends, those you have always opened the door to, will soon impose on themselves to stop talking about you.

An ever-relevant story, which could be applied to the lives of many, if not each of us: as Zeno Cosini said, it's easy to believe oneself to be great with latent greatness. So the Wheelers want a life they believe they deserve; instead, they deserve each other, exactly as they are, in the context in which they find themselves. "You're a guy who made me laugh at a party, and now just looking at you disgusts me."